Everything belonged to him–but that was a trifle. The thing to know was what he belonged to, how many powers of darkness claimed him for their own.
JOSEPH CONRADTo be a great autocrat you must be a great barbarian.
More Joseph Conrad Quotes
-
-
I am afraid that if you want to go down into history you’ll have to do something for it.
JOSEPH CONRAD -
God is for men, and religion for women.
JOSEPH CONRAD -
All roads are long which lead to one’s heart’s desire.
JOSEPH CONRAD -
The human heart is vast enough to contain all the world.
JOSEPH CONRAD -
Gossip is what no one claims to like, but everybody enjoys.
JOSEPH CONRAD -
To be busy with material affairs is the best preservative against reflection, fears, doubts, all these things which stand in the way of achievement. I suppose a fellow proposing to cut his throat would experience a sort of relief while occupied in stropping his razor carefully.
JOSEPH CONRAD -
But it is like a running blaze on a plain, like a flash of lightning in the clouds. We live in the flicker – may it last as long as the old earth keeps rolling!
JOSEPH CONRAD -
As a general rule, a reputation is built on manner as much as on achievement.
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.
JOSEPH CONRAD -
The question is not how to get cured, but how to live.
JOSEPH CONRAD -
What makes mankind tragic is not that they are the victims of nature, it is that they are conscious of it.
JOSEPH CONRAD -
I slipped the book into my pocket. I assure you to leave off reading was like tearing myself away from the shelter of an old and solid friendship.
JOSEPH CONRAD -
It is to be remarked that a good many people are born curiously unfitted for the fate waiting them on this earth.
JOSEPH CONRAD -
It is my belief no man ever understands quite his own artful dodges to escape from the grim shadow of self knowledge.
JOSEPH CONRAD -
The ethical view of the universe involves us in so many cruel and absurd contradictions that I have come to suspect that the aim of creation cannot be ethical at all.
JOSEPH CONRAD -
The belief in a supernatural source of evil is not necessary; men alone are quite capable of every wickedness.
JOSEPH CONRAD -
That’s why love is so inseparable from any talk about truth and death, because we know that love is fundamentally a death of an old self that was isolated and the emergence of a new self now entangled with another self, the self that you fall in love with.
JOSEPH CONRAD -
There is no credulity so eager and blind as the credulity of covetousness, which, in its universal extent, measures the moral misery and the intellectual destitution of mankind.
JOSEPH CONRAD -
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 -
To be a great autocrat you must be a great barbarian.
JOSEPH CONRAD -
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 CONRAD -
It would take too long to explain the intimate alliance of contradictions in human nature which makes love itself wear at times the desperate shape of betrayal. And perhaps there is no possible explanation.
JOSEPH CONRAD -
Facing it, always facing it, that’s the way to get through. Face it.
JOSEPH CONRAD -
The mind of man is capable of anything.
JOSEPH CONRAD -
A word carries far, very far, deals destruction through time as the bullets go flying through space.
JOSEPH CONRAD -
The sea has never been friendly to man. At most it has been the accomplice of human restlessness.
JOSEPH CONRAD