The sea – this truth must be confessed – has no generosity. No display of manly qualities – courage, hardihood, endurance, faithfulness – has ever been known to touch its irresponsible consciousness of power.
JOSEPH CONRADIt’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.
More Joseph Conrad Quotes
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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.
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But 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!
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It occurred to me that my speech or my silence, indeed any action of mine, would be a mere futility.
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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.
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Vanity plays lurid tricks with our memory, and the truth of every passion wants some pretence to make it live.
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I always went my own road and on my own legs where I had a mind to go.
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The sea has never been friendly to man. At most it has been the accomplice of human restlessness.
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You shall judge a man by his foes as well as by his friends.
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It is respectable to have no illusions, and safe, and profitable and dull.
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A task, any task, undertaken in an adventurous spirit acquires the merit of romance.
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A writing may be lost; a lie may be written; but what the eye has seen is truth and remains in the mind!
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There is something haunting in the light of the moon; it has all the dispassionateness of a disembodied soul, and something of its inconceivable mystery.
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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.
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The mind of man is capable of anything.
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Being a woman is a terribly difficult task, since it consists principally in dealing with men.
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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.
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Going home must be like going to render an account.
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All creative art is magic, is evocation of the unseen in forms persuasive, enlightening, familiar and surprising.
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In order to move others deeply we must deliberately allow ourselves to be carried away beyond the bounds of our normal sensibility.
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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.
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Imagination, not invention, is the supreme master of art as of life.
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Gossip is what no one claims to like, but everybody enjoys.
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The belief in a supernatural source of evil is not necessary; men alone are quite capable of every wickedness.
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You can’t, in sound morals, condemn a man for taking care of his own integrity. It is his clear duty.
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Art is long and life is short, and success is very far off.
JOSEPH CONRAD -
Kisses are the remnants of paradise.
JOSEPH CONRAD