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 occurred to me that my speech or my silence, indeed any action of mine, would be a mere futility.
More Joseph Conrad Quotes
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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 -
The scrupulous and the just, the noble, humane, and devoted natures; the unselfish and the intelligent may begin a movement – but it passes away from them. They are not the leaders of a revolution. They are its victims.
JOSEPH CONRAD -
Everybody had to be thoroughly understood before being accepted.
JOSEPH CONRAD -
Vanity plays lurid tricks with our memory, and the truth of every passion wants some pretence to make it live.
JOSEPH CONRAD -
All a man can betray is his conscience.
JOSEPH CONRAD -
A writer without interest or sympathy for the foibles of his fellow man is not conceivable as a writer.
JOSEPH CONRAD -
You shall judge a man by his foes as well as by his friends.
JOSEPH CONRAD -
In order to move others deeply we must deliberately allow ourselves to be carried away beyond the bounds of our normal sensibility.
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’s only those who do nothing that make no mistakes, I suppose.
JOSEPH CONRAD -
There is nothing more enticing, disenchanting, and enslaving than the life at sea.
JOSEPH CONRAD -
Reality, as usual, beats fiction out of sight.
JOSEPH CONRAD -
The discovery of America was the occasion of the greatest outburst of cruelty and reckless greed known in history.
JOSEPH CONRAD -
One must explore deep and believe the incredible to find the new particles of truth floating in an ocean of insignificance.
JOSEPH CONRAD -
Going home must be like going to render an account.
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 -
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 -
To be a great autocrat you must be a great barbarian.
JOSEPH CONRAD -
Few men realize that their life, the very essence of their character, their capabilities and their audacities, are only the expression of their belief in the safety of their surroundings.
JOSEPH CONRAD -
All ambitions are lawful except those which climb upward on the miseries or credulities 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 -
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 -
The sea has never been friendly to man. At most it has been the accomplice of human restlessness.
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 -
Perhaps life is just that- a dream and a fear.
JOSEPH CONRAD -
It is respectable to have no illusions, and safe, and profitable and dull.
JOSEPH CONRAD