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 CONRADBut 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!
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 -
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 -
Everything belonged to him–but that was a trifle. The thing to know was what he belonged to, how many powers of darkness claimed him for their own.
JOSEPH CONRAD -
A man is a worker. If he is not that he is nothing.
JOSEPH CONRAD -
To 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.
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 -
As a general rule, a reputation is built on manner as much as on achievement.
JOSEPH CONRAD -
Being a woman is a terribly difficult task, since it consists principally in dealing with men.
JOSEPH CONRAD -
Your strength is just an accident owed to the weakness of others.
JOSEPH CONRAD -
All creative art is magic, is evocation of the unseen in forms persuasive, enlightening, familiar and surprising.
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.
JOSEPH CONRAD -
The sea has never been friendly to man. At most it has been the accomplice of human restlessness.
JOSEPH CONRAD -
The real significance of crime is in its being a breach of faith with the community of mankind.
JOSEPH CONRAD -
I don’t like work but I like what is in work – the chance to find yourself. Your own reality – for yourself, not for others – which no other man can ever know.
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 -
The mind of man is capable of anything.
JOSEPH CONRAD -
Vanity plays lurid tricks with our memory, and the truth of every passion wants some pretence to make it live.
JOSEPH CONRAD -
A word carries far, very far, deals destruction through time as the bullets go flying through space.
JOSEPH CONRAD -
The human heart is vast enough to contain all the world.
JOSEPH CONRAD -
Perhaps life is just that- a dream and a fear.
JOSEPH CONRAD -
Give me the right word and the right accent and I will move the world.
JOSEPH CONRAD -
Follow your bliss. Find where it is and don’t be afraid to follow it.
JOSEPH CONRAD -
I am afraid that if you want to go down into history you’ll have to do something for it.
JOSEPH CONRAD -
All roads are long which lead to one’s heart’s desire.
JOSEPH CONRAD -
God is for men, and religion for women.
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.
JOSEPH CONRAD