It’s extraordinary how we go through life with eyes half shut, with dull ears, with dormant thoughts. Perhaps it’s just as well; and it may be that it is this very dullness that makes life to the incalculable majority so supportable and so welcome.
JOSEPH CONRADIt is not the clear-sighted who rule the world. Great achievements are accomplished in a blessed, warm fog.
More Joseph Conrad Quotes
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Facing it, always facing it, that’s the way to get through. Face it.
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Any fool can carry on, but a wise man knows how to shorten sail in time.
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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.
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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.
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A task, any task, undertaken in an adventurous spirit acquires the merit of romance.
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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.
JOSEPH CONRAD -
The human heart is vast enough to contain all the world.
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We can never cease to be ourselves.
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I always went my own road and on my own legs where I had a mind to go.
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He who wants to persuade should put his trust not in the right argument, but in the right word. The power of sound has always been greater than the power of sense.
JOSEPH CONRAD -
Everything can be found at sea according to the spirit of your quest.
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As a general rule, a reputation is built on manner as much as on achievement.
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To have his path made clear for him is the aspiration of every human being in our beclouded and tempestuous existence.
JOSEPH CONRAD -
Art is long and life is short, and success is very far off.
JOSEPH CONRAD -
There is nothing more enticing, disenchanting, and enslaving than the life at sea.
JOSEPH CONRAD -
Perhaps life is just that- a dream and a fear.
JOSEPH CONRAD -
The discovery of America was the occasion of the greatest outburst of cruelty and reckless greed known in history.
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Any work that aspires, however humbly, to the condition of art should carry its justification in every line.
JOSEPH CONRAD -
You know I hate, detest, and can’t bear a lie, not because I am straighter than the rest of us, but simply because it appals me. There is a taint of death, a flavour of mortality in lies – which is exactly what I hate and detest in the world – what I want to forget.
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All ambitions are lawful except those which climb upward on the miseries or credulities of mankind.
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Vanity plays lurid tricks with our memory, and the truth of every passion wants some pretence to make it live.
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A writing may be lost; a lie may be written; but what the eye has seen is truth and remains in the mind!
JOSEPH CONRAD -
If you don’t make mistakes, you don’t make anything .
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All creative art is magic, is evocation of the unseen in forms persuasive, enlightening, familiar and surprising.
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It occurred to me that my speech or my silence, indeed any action of mine, would be a mere futility.
JOSEPH CONRAD -
It is respectable to have no illusions, and safe, and profitable and dull.
JOSEPH CONRAD