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 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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The human heart is vast enough to contain all the world.
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 -
We live in the flicker — may it last as long as the old earth keeps rolling! But darkness was here yesterday.
JOSEPH CONRAD -
The question is not how to get cured, but how to live.
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 -
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 -
What makes mankind tragic is not that they are the victims of nature, it is that they are conscious of it.
JOSEPH CONRAD -
The sea has never been friendly to man. At most it has been the accomplice of human restlessness.
JOSEPH CONRAD -
All a man can betray is his conscience.
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 -
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 -
All roads are long which lead to one’s heart’s desire.
JOSEPH CONRAD -
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.
JOSEPH CONRAD -
It is not the clear-sighted who rule the world. Great achievements are accomplished in a blessed, warm fog.
JOSEPH CONRAD -
Reality, as usual, beats fiction out of sight.
JOSEPH CONRAD






