Quotes from Joseph Conrad

God is for men, and religion for women.

This magnificent butterfly finds a little heap of dirt and sits still on it; but man will never on his heap of mud keep still.

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

Well! well! It's only those who do nothing that make no mistakes, I suppose. But it's hard. Hard.

Vanity plays lurid tricks with our memory, and the truth of every passion wants some pretence to make it live.

I don't like work... but I like what is in work - the chance to find yourself. Your own reality - for yourself, not for others - which no other man can ever know.

Any work that aspires, however humbly, to the condition of art should carry its justification in every line.

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

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

A modern fleet of ships does not so much make use of the sea as exploit a highway.

I like what is in the work -- the chance to find yourself.

He has to live in the midst of the incomprehensible, which is detestable. And it has a fascination, too, which goes to work upon him. The fascination of the abomination--you know.

In order to move others deeply we must deliberately allow ourselves to be carried away beyond the bounds of our normal sensibility.

The air of the New World seems favorable to the art of declamation.

All creative art is magic, is evocation of the unseen in forms persuasive, enlightening, familiar and surprising.

History repeats itself, but the special call of an art which has passed away is never reproduced. It is as utterly gone out of the world as the song of a destroyed wild bird.

History repeats itself but the special call of an art which has passed away is never reproduced. It is utterly gone out of the world as the song of a destroyed wild bird.

There is a subtle and unmistakable touch of love and pride, beyond mere skill, almost an inspiration which gives to all work that finish which is almost art - which is art.

The scrupulous and the just, the noble, humane, and devoted natures; the unselfish and the intelligent may begin a movement - but it passes away from them. They are not the leaders of a revolution. They are its victims.

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...

All a man can betray is his conscience.

The last thing a woman will consent to discover in a man whom she loves or on whom she simply depends is want of courage.

I have wrestled with death. It is the most unexciting contest you can imagine.

The artist in his calling of interpreter creates because he must. He is so much of a voice that, for him, silence is like death