All ambitions are lawful except those which climb upward on the miseries or credulities of mankind.
JOSEPH CONRADTo 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.
More Joseph Conrad Quotes
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A task, any task, undertaken in an adventurous spirit acquires the merit of romance.
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 -
He struggled with himself, too. I saw it — I heard it. I saw the inconceivable mystery of a soul that knew no restraint, no faith, and no fear, yet struggling blindly with itself.
JOSEPH CONRAD -
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 -
A certain simplicity of thought is common to serene souls at both ends of the social scale.
JOSEPH CONRAD -
I take it that what all men are really after is some form or perhaps only some formula of peace.
JOSEPH CONRAD -
The real significance of crime is in its being a breach of faith with the community of mankind.
JOSEPH CONRAD -
We live in the flicker — may it last as long as the old earth keeps rolling! But darkness was here yesterday.
JOSEPH CONRAD -
Imagination, not invention, is the supreme master of art as of life.
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 -
God is for men, and religion for women.
JOSEPH CONRAD -
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 -
Perhaps life is just that- a dream and a fear.
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 -
What makes mankind tragic is not that they are the victims of nature, it is that they are conscious of it.
JOSEPH CONRAD