Quotes from Joseph Conrad

There is never enough time to say our last word-the last word of our love, of our desire, faith, remorse, submission, revolt.

There is something haunting in the light of the moon.

What is a novel if not a conviction of our fellow-men's existence strong enough to take upon itself a form of imagined life clearer than reality and whose accumulated verisimilitude of selected episodes puts to shame the pride of documentary history?

Nations it may be have fashioned their Governments, but the Governments have paid them back in the same coin.

Facing it always facing it that's the way to get through.

It's only those who do nothing that make no mistakes, I suppose.

Gossip is what no one claims to like -- but everyone enjoys.

It is respectable to have illusions - and safe - and profitable, and dull

For what we call illusions are often, in truth, a wider vision of past and present realities --a willing movement of a man's soul with the larger sweep of the world's forces --a movement towards a more assured end than the chances of a single life.

Words, as is well known, are great foes of reality

To have his path made clear for him is the aspiration of every human being in our beclouded and tempestuous existence.

A word carries far - very far - deals destruction through time as the bullets go flying through space.

An artist is a man of action, whether he creates a personality, invents an expedient, or finds the issue of a complicated situation.

A man's most open actions have a secret side to them.

For the great mass of mankind the only saving grace that is needed is steady fidelity to what is nearest to hand and heart in the short moment of each human effort.

A man is a worker. If he is not that he is nothing.

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

Vanity plays lurid tricks with our memory.

The real significance of crime is in its being a breach of faith with the community of mankind

A caricature is putting the face of a joke on the body of a truth.

You shall judge a man by his foes as well as by his friends.

Goodbye, brothers! You were a good crowd. As good a crowd as ever fisted with wild cries the beating canvas of a heavy foresail; or tossing aloft, invisible in the night, gave back yell for yell to a westerly gale.

The true peace of God begins at any spot a thousand miles from the nearest land.

The ship, a fragment detached from the earth, went on lonely and swift like a small planet.