Joseph Conrad was a Polish-British writer regarded as one of the greatest novelists to write in the English language. Though he did not speak English fluently until his twenties, he became a master prose stylist who brought a non-English sensibility into English literature. These Joseph Conrad quotes will motivate you.
Best Joseph Conrad Quotes
- “The belief in a supernatural source of evil is not necessary; men alone are quite capable of every wickedness.” ~ Joseph Conrad
- “Being a woman is a terribly difficult task, since it consists principally in dealing with men.” ~ Joseph Conrad
- “Facing it, always facing it, that’s the way to get through. Face it.” ~ Joseph Conrad
- “If you don’t make mistakes, you don’t make anything .” ~ 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
- “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
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“All roads are long which lead to one’s heart’s desire.” ~ Joseph Conrad
- “Follow your bliss. Find where it is and don’t be afraid to follow it.” ~ Joseph Conrad
- “You must squeeze out of yourself every sensation, every thought, every image, – mercilessly, without reserve and without remorse: you must search the darkest corners of your heart, the most remote recesses of your brain, – you must search them for the image, for the glamour, for the right expression. And you must do it sincerely, at any cost: you must do it so that at the end of your day’s work you should feel exhausted, emptied of every sensation and every thought, with a blank mind and an aching heart, with the notion that there is nothing, – nothing left in you.” ~ Joseph Conrad Quotes
- “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
- “The discovery of America was the occasion of the greatest outburst of cruelty and reckless greed known in history.” ~ Joseph Conrad
- “Imagination, not invention, is the supreme master of art as of life.” ~ Joseph Conrad
- “We live as we dream – alone. While the dream disappears, the life continues painfully.” ~ Joseph Conrad
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“It is the mark of an inexperienced man not to believe in luck.” ~ Joseph Conrad
- “Words, as is well known, are the great foes of reality.” ~ Joseph Conrad
- “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 Conrad
- “One must explore deep and believe the incredible to find the new particles of truth floating in an ocean of insignificance.” ~ Joseph Conrad
- “It is my belief no man ever understands quite his own artful dodges to escape from the grim shadow of self-knowledge.” ~ Joseph Conrad
- “All a man can betray is his conscience.” ~ Joseph Conrad
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“Reality, as usual, beats fiction out of sight.” ~ Joseph Conrad
- “Any fool can carry on, but a wise man knows how to shorten sail in time.” ~ Joseph Conrad
- “One ship is very much like another and the sea is always the same. In the immutability of their surroundings the foreign shores, the foreign faces, the changing immensity of life, glide past, veiled not by a sense of mystery but by a slightly disdainful ignorance; for there is nothing mysterious to a seaman unless it be the sea itself, which is the mistress of his existence and as inscrutable as Destiny.” ~ Joseph Conrad
- “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 Conrad
- “All creative art is magic, is evocation of the unseen in forms persuasive, enlightening, familiar and surprising.” ~ Joseph Conrad
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“Kisses are the remnants of paradise.” ~ Joseph Conrad
- “All ambitions are lawful except those which climb upward on the miseries or credulities of mankind.” ~ Joseph Conrad
- “In order to move others deeply we must deliberately allow ourselves to be carried away beyond the bounds of our normal sensibility.” ~ 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
- “The mind of man is capable of anything.” ~ Joseph Conrad
- “God is for men, and religion for women.” ~ Joseph Conrad
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“Never test another man by your own weakness.” ~ 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
- “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
- “Gossip is what no one claims to like, but everybody enjoys.” ~ Joseph Conrad
- “You can’t, in sound morals, condemn a man for taking care of his own integrity. It is his clear duty.” ~ Joseph Conrad
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“There is nothing more enticing, disenchanting, and enslaving than the life at sea.” ~ Joseph Conrad
- “I slipped the book into my pocket. I assure you to leave off reading was like tearing myself away from the shelter of an old and solid friendship.” ~ 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
- “It’s only those who do nothing that make no mistakes, I suppose.” ~ Joseph Conrad
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“We live as we dream – alone.” ~ Joseph Conrad
- “A task, any task, undertaken in an adventurous spirit acquires the merit of romance.” ~ 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 - “As a general rule, a reputation is built on manner as much as on achievement.” ~ 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
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“We can never cease to be ourselves.” ~ 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
- “What makes mankind tragic is not that they are the victims of nature, it is that they are conscious of 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 Quotes
- “A word carries far, very far, deals destruction through time as the bullets go flying through space.” ~ Joseph Conrad
- “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!” ~ Joseph Conrad
- “Art is long and life is short, and success is very far off.” ~ Joseph Conrad
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“Your strength is just an accident owed to the weakness of others.” ~ Joseph Conrad
- “To have his path made clear for him is the aspiration of every human being in our beclouded and tempestuous existence.” ~ Joseph Conrad
- “Danger lies in the writer becoming the victim of his own exaggeration, losing the exact notion of sincerity, and in the end coming to despise truth itself as something too cold, too blunt for his purpose — as, in fact, not good enough for his insistent emotion. From laughter and tears the descent is easy to sniveling and giggles.” ~ Joseph Conrad
- “I have wrestled with death. It is the most unexciting contest you can imagine.” ~ Joseph Conrad
- “A man is a worker. If he is not that he is nothing.” ~ Joseph Conrad
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“Give me the right word and the right accent and I will move the world.” ~ Joseph Conrad
- “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.” ~ Joseph Conrad
- “Droll thing life is — that mysterious arrangement of merciless logic for a futile purpose. The most you can hope from it is some knowledge of yourself — that comes too late — a crop of inextinguishable regrets.” ~ Joseph Conrad
- “A writer without interest or sympathy for the foibles of his fellow man is not conceivable as a writer.” ~ 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
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“A certain simplicity of thought is common to serene souls at both ends of the social scale.” ~ Joseph Conrad
- “Everything can be found at sea according to the spirit of your quest.” ~ 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. That — and no more, and it is everything. If I succeed, you shall find there according to your deserts: encouragement, consolation, fear, charm — all you demand; and, perhaps, also that glimpse of truth for which you have forgotten to ask.” ~ Joseph Conrad
- “A writing may be lost; a lie may be written, but what the eye has seen is truth and remains in the mind!” ~ Joseph Conrad
