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 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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I always went my own road and on my own legs where I had a mind to go.
JOSEPH CONRAD -
Follow your bliss. Find where it is and don’t be afraid to follow it.
JOSEPH CONRAD -
I like what is in the work — the chance to find yourself.
JOSEPH CONRAD -
The real significance of crime is in its being a breach of faith with the community of mankind.
JOSEPH CONRAD -
It is not the clear-sighted who rule the world. Great achievements are accomplished in a blessed, warm fog.
JOSEPH CONRAD -
To be a great autocrat you must be a great barbarian.
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 -
It is the mark of an inexperienced man not to believe in luck.
JOSEPH CONRAD -
It’s extraordinary how we go through life with eyes half shut, with dull ears, with dormant thoughts. Perhaps it’s just as well; and it may be that it is this very dullness that makes life to the incalculable majority so supportable and so welcome.
JOSEPH CONRAD -
Give me the right word and the right accent and I will move the world.
JOSEPH CONRAD -
Any fool can carry on, but a wise man knows how to shorten sail in time.
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 -
Facing it, always facing it, that’s the way to get through. Face it.
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Protection is the first necessity of opulence and luxury.
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