black
grey
blue
red
brown
white

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

My task, which I am trying to achieve is, by the power of the written word, to make you hear, to make you feel–it is, before all, to make you see.
JOSEPH CONRAD

Achievement Feeling Myself Power See Try Word Writing Yourself
Going home must be like going to render an account.
JOSEPH CONRAD

Account Home Journey
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

Achievement Affair Busy Doubt Experience Fear Material Reflection
If you don’t make mistakes, you don’t make anything .
JOSEPH CONRAD

Defeat Failure Inspirational Mistake Perspective Yourself
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

Death Forget Hate Mortal Myself Simplicity World
In order to move others deeply we must deliberately allow ourselves to be carried away beyond the bounds of our normal sensibility.
JOSEPH CONRAD

Beyond Carry Move Normal Order Ourselves
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

Darkness Himself Power
I like what is in the work — the chance to find yourself.
JOSEPH CONRAD

Discover Myself Work
Any work that aspires, however humbly, to the condition of art should carry its justification in every line.
JOSEPH CONRAD

Art Aspiration Carry Condition Humble Justice Work
A writer without interest or sympathy for the foibles of his fellow man is not conceivable as a writer.
JOSEPH CONRAD

Interest Sympathy Writing
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

Chance Discover Reality Work Yourself
Vanity plays lurid tricks with our memory, and the truth of every passion wants some pretence to make it live.
JOSEPH CONRAD

Live Memories Passion Pretend Truth
It is respectable to have no illusions, and safe, and profitable and dull.
JOSEPH CONRAD

Illusion Profit Respect Safety
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

Intellectual Kind Man Measurement Misery Universal
Reality, as usual, beats fiction out of sight.
JOSEPH CONRAD

Fiction One Liner Reality
History repeats itself, but the special call of an art which has passed away is never reproduced. It is as utterly gone out of the world as the song of a destroyed wild bird.
JOSEPH CONRAD

Art Bird Destroy History Repeat Reproduction Song Wild World

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.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

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.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

More Joseph Conrad Quotes