Quotes from Joseph Conrad

There is a weird power in a spoken word…. And a word carries far—very far—deals destruction through time as the bullets go flying through space.

The world of finance is a mysterious world in which, incredible as the fact may appear, evaporation precedes liquidation. First the capital evaporates, and then the company goes into liquidation.

The conquest of the earth, which mostly means the taking it away from those who have a different complexion or slightly flatter noses than ourselves, is not a pretty thing when you look into it.

My task… to make you hear, to make you feel—it is, before all, to make you see. That—and no more, and it is everything.

Going home must be like going to render an account.

Running… all over the sea trying to get behind the weather.

It is a maudlin and indecent verity that comes out through the strength of wine.

Action is consolatory. It is the enemy of thought and the friend of illusions.

All ambitions are lawful except those that climb upward on the miseries or credulities of mankind.

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 woman is a terribly difficult task since it consists principally in dealing with men.

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

Having had to encounter single-handed during his period of eclipse many physical dangers, he was well aware of the most dangerous element common to them all: of the crushing, paralysing sense of human littleness, which is what really defeats a human struggling with natural forces, alone, far from the eyes of his fellows.

How does one kill fear, I wonder How do you shoot a spectre through the heart, slash off its spectral head, take it by the spectral throat

Only the young have such moments .I don´t mean the very young, No. The very young have, properly speaking, no moments.

The discovery of America was the occasion of the greatest outburst of cruelty and reckless greed known in history.

The way of even the most jusitifiable revolution is prepared by personal impulses disguised into creeds.

They talk of a man betraying his country, his friends, his sweetheart. There must be a moral bond first. All a man can betray is his conscience.

You can t, in sound morals, condemn a man for taking care of his own integrity. It is his clear duty. And least of all can you condemn an artist pursuing, however humbly and imperfectly, a creative aim. In that interior world where his thought and his emotions go seeking for the experience of imagined adventures, there are no policemen, no law, no pressure of circumstance or dread of opinion to keep him within bounds. Who then is going to say Nay to his temptations if not his conscience?

Being a woman is a terribly difficult trade since it consists principally of dealings with men.

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

It was written I should be loyal to the nightmare of my choice.

Let them think what they liked, but I didn't mean to drown myself. I meant to swim till I sank -- but that's not the same thing.

Your strength is just an accident arising from the weakness of others.