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 CONRADIt 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.
More Joseph Conrad Quotes
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Words, as is well known, are the great foes of reality.
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We live as we dream – alone.
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I have wrestled with death. It is the most unexciting contest you can imagine.
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Perhaps life is just that- a dream and a fear.
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What makes mankind tragic is not that they are the victims of nature, it is that they are conscious of it.
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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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It occurred to me that my speech or my silence, indeed any action of mine, would be a mere futility.
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A word carries far, very far, deals destruction through time as the bullets go flying through space.
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I am afraid that if you want to go down into history you’ll have to do something for it.
JOSEPH CONRAD -
The conquest of the earth, which mostly means the taking it away from those who have a different complexion or slightly flatter noses than ourselves, is not a pretty thing when you look into it too much.
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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 -
Reality, as usual, beats fiction out of sight.
JOSEPH CONRAD -
All ambitions are lawful except those which climb upward on the miseries or credulities of mankind.
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Kisses are the remnants of paradise.
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I like what is in the work — the chance to find yourself.
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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 -
Nowhere 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.
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Protection is the first necessity of opulence and luxury.
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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.
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We live in the flicker — may it last as long as the old earth keeps rolling! But darkness was here yesterday.
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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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To have his path made clear for him is the aspiration of every human being in our beclouded and tempestuous existence.
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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 -
It is not the clear-sighted who rule the world. Great achievements are accomplished in a blessed, warm fog.
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All roads are long which lead to one’s heart’s desire.
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Who knows what true loneliness is – not the conventional word but the naked terror? To the lonely themselves it wears a mask. The most miserable outcast hugs some memory or some illusion.
JOSEPH CONRAD