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.
JOSEPH CONRADNowhere else than upon the sea do the days, weeks, and months fall away quicker into the past. They seem to be left astern as easily as the light air-bubbles in the swirls of the ship’s wake.
More Joseph Conrad Quotes
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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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You can’t, in sound morals, condemn a man for taking care of his own integrity. It is his clear duty.
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Protection is the first necessity of opulence and luxury.
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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!
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Give me the right word and the right accent and I will move the world.
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A certain simplicity of thought is common to serene souls at both ends of the social scale.
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Facing it, always facing it, that’s the way to get through. Face it.
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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.
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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!
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Imagination, not invention, is the supreme master of art as of life.
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The discovery of America was the occasion of the greatest outburst of cruelty and reckless greed known in history.
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They were conquerors, and for that you want only brute force–nothing to boast of, when you have it, since your strength is just an accident arising from the weakness of others.
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A task, any task, undertaken in an adventurous spirit acquires the merit of romance.
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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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Any work that aspires, however humbly, to the condition of art should carry its justification in every line.
JOSEPH CONRAD