Any fool can carry on, but a wise man knows how to shorten sail in time.
JOSEPH CONRADAny fool can carry on, but a wise man knows how to shorten sail in time.
JOSEPH CONRADThere 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 CONRADVanity plays lurid tricks with our memory, and the truth of every passion wants some pretence to make it live.
JOSEPH CONRADPerhaps life is just that- a dream and a fear.
JOSEPH CONRADAll ambitions are lawful except those which climb upward on the miseries or credulities of mankind.
JOSEPH CONRADThe sea – this truth must be confessed – has no generosity. No display of manly qualities – courage, hardihood, endurance, faithfulness – has ever been known to touch its irresponsible consciousness of power.
JOSEPH CONRADTo be a great autocrat you must be a great barbarian.
JOSEPH CONRADAs a general rule, a reputation is built on manner as much as on achievement.
JOSEPH CONRADHe 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 CONRADA task, any task, undertaken in an adventurous spirit acquires the merit of romance.
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.
JOSEPH CONRADThat’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 CONRADIt is to be remarked that a good many people are born curiously unfitted for the fate waiting them on this earth.
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.
JOSEPH CONRADYour strength is just an accident owed to the weakness of others.
JOSEPH CONRADYou shall judge a man by his foes as well as by his friends.
JOSEPH CONRAD