Joseph Conrad Quotes: 19

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

  Chance

• Woe to the man whose heart has not learned while young to hope, to love - and to put its trust in life.

• 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.

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

  An Outcast of the Islands

• My task, which I am trying to achieve is, by the power of the written word, to make you hear, to make you feel--it is, before all, to make you see.

  Lord Jim

• Facing it, always facing it, that’s the way to get through. Face it.

• Droll thing life is -- that mysterious arrangement of merciless logic for a futile purpose. The most you can hope from it is some knowledge of yourself -- that comes too late -- a crop of inextinguishable regrets.

  Heart of Darkness

• The mind of man is capable of anything.

  Heart of Darkness

• Of all the inanimate objects, of all men's creations, books are the nearest to us for they contain our very thoughts, our ambitions, our indignations, our illusions, our fidelity to the truth, and our persistent leanings to error. But most of all they resemble us in their precious hold on life.

• The question is not how to get cured, but how to live.

• Few men realize that their life, the very essence of their character, their capabilities and their audacities, are only the expression of their belief in the safety of their surroundings.

• Perhaps life is just that... a dream and a fear

• Do you see the story? Do you see anything? It seems to me I am trying to tell you a dream--making a vain attempt, because no relation of a dream can convey the dream-sensation, that commingling of absurdity, surprise, and bewilderment in a tremor of struggling revolt, that notion of being captured by the incredible which is the very essence of dreams...

  Heart of Darkness

• Like a running blaze on a plain, like a flash of lightning in the clouds. We live in the flicker.

  Heart of Darkness

• It is my belief no man ever understands quite his own artful dodges to escape from the grim shadow of self-knowledge.

  Lord Jim

• A writing may be lost; a lie may be written; but what the eye has seen is truth and remains in the mind!

  The Lagoon

• By heavens! there is something after all in the world allowing one man to steal a horse while another must not look at a halter. Steal a horse straight out. Very well. He has done it. Perhaps he can ride. But there is a way of looking at a halter that would provoke the most charitable of saints into a kick.

  Heart of Darkness

• I had turned away from the picture and was going back to the world where events move, men change, light flickers, life flows in a clear stream, no matter whether over mud or over stones.

  Lord Jim

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

  Lord Jim