Quotes from Joseph Conrad

Juzga a un hombre tanto por sus amigos como por sus enemigos.

When Germans start being accurate, there's no end to it!

There can be no life without faith and love—faith in a human heart, love of a human being! That

is always better to bow too low than not bow low enough.

Midway upon the journey of our life I found myself within a forest dark, For the straight-forward pathway had been lost

I certainly must, said she. This sensation of listlessness, weariness, stupidity, this disinclination to sit down and employ myself, this feeling of every thing's being dull and insipid about the house!— I must be in love;

he knew very well we were all mortal

for the future he knows only by guesswork, and that not always; for it is reserved for God alone to know the times and the seasons, and for him there is neither past nor future; all is present.

Lamentations comfort only by lacerating the heart still more. Such grief does not desire consolation. It feeds on the sense of its hopelessness. Lamentations spring only from the constant craving to re-open the wound.

Anarchists, I suppose, have no families--not, at any rate, as we understand that social relation. Organization into families may answer to a need of human nature, but in the last instance it is based on law, and therefore must be something odious and impossible to an anarchist.

The greatest of my gifts being a consummate capacity for doing nothing, I cannot even point to boredom as a rational stimulus for taking up a pen. The pen, at any rate, was there, and there is nothing wonderful in that.

A gust of wind struck upon the nape of Jukes' neck and next moment he felt it streaming about his wet ankles. The stokehold ventilators hummed: in front of the six fire-doors two wild figures, stripped to the waist, staggered and stooped, wrestling with two shovels.

it is impossible to convey the life-sensation of any given epoch of one's existence — that which makes its truth, its meaning — its subtle and penetrating essence. It is impossible. We live, as we dream — alone...

I don't like work--no man does--but I like what is in the work--the chance to find yourself. Your own reality--for yourself not for others--what no other man can ever know. They can only see the mere show, and never can tell what it really means.

Du calme, du calme, adieu.

Criticism, that fine flower of personal expression in the garden of letters.

It is not the clear-sighted who rule the world. Great achievements are accomplished in a blessed, warm fog.

As in political so in literary action a man wins friends for himself mostly by the passion of his prejudices and the consistent narrowness of his outlook.

Being a lady is a frightfully troublesome assignment, since it comprises mainly in managing men.

I can't tell if a straw ever saved a drowning man, but I know that a mere glance is enough to make dspair pause. For in truth, we who are creatures of impulse, are creatures of despair.

Things and men have always a certain sense, a certain side by which they must be got hold of if one wants to obtain a solid grasp and a perfect command.

What makes mankind tragic is not that they are the victims of nature, it is that they are conscious of it.

There is something haunting in the light of the moon it has all the dispassionateness of a disembodied soul and something of its inconceivable mystery.

I take it that what all men are really after is some form or perhaps only some formula of peace.