Top 500 Joseph Conrad Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “We live as we dream – alone. While the dream disappears, the life continues painfully.”

— Joseph Conrad

Featured in: Loneliness Quotes, Sadness Quotes

2. “We live as we dream – alone...”

— Joseph Conrad

Featured in: Loneliness Quotes

3. “It’s only those who do nothing that make no mistakes, I suppose.”

— Joseph Conrad

4. “Being a woman is a terribly difficult task, since it consists principally in dealing with men.”

— Joseph Conrad

5. “The sea has never been friendly to man. At most it has been the accomplice of human restlessness.”

— Joseph Conrad

6. “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

7. “Let them think what they liked, but I didn’t mean to drown myself. I meant to swim till I sank – but that’s not the same thing.”

— Joseph Conrad

8. “If you don’t make mistakes, you don’t make anything .”

— Joseph Conrad

9. “Facing it, always facing it, that’s the way to get through. Face it.”

— Joseph Conrad

10. “The belief in a supernatural source of evil is not necessary; men alone are quite capable of every wickedness.”

— Joseph Conrad

11. “God is for men, and religion for women.”

— Joseph Conrad

12. “A man is a worker. If he is not that he is nothing.”

— Joseph Conrad

13. “An artist is a man of action, whether he creates a personality, invents an expedient, or finds the issue of a complicated situation.”

— Joseph Conrad

14. “The mind of man is capable of anything – because everything is in it, all the past as well as all the future. What was there after all? Joy, fear, sorrow, devotion, valor, rage – who can tell? – but truth – truth stripped of its cloak of time.”

— Joseph Conrad

15. “We live in the flicker – may it last as long as the old earth keeps rolling! But darkness was here yesterday.”

— Joseph Conrad

16. “We penetrated deeper and deeper into the heart of darkness.”

— Joseph Conrad

17. “The question is not how to get cured, but how to live.”

— Joseph Conrad

18. “The vilest scramble for loot that ever disfigured the history of human conscience.”

— Joseph Conrad

19. “The true peace of God begins at any spot a thousand miles from the nearest land.”

— Joseph Conrad

20. “Woe to the man whose heart has not learned while young to hope, to love – and to put its trust in life.”

— Joseph Conrad

21. “The mind of man is capable of anything.”

— Joseph Conrad

22. “The dreams of men, the seed of commonwealth, the germs of empires.”

— Joseph Conrad

23. “Art is long and life is short, and success is very far off.”

— Joseph Conrad

Featured in: Life Is Short Quotes

24. “All creative art is magic, is evocation of the unseen in forms persuasive, enlightening, familiar and surprising.”

— Joseph Conrad

25. “But his soul was mad. Being alone in the wilderness, it had looked within itself and, by heavens I tell you, it had gone mad.”

— Joseph Conrad

26. “I remember my youth and the feeling that will never come back any more.”

— Joseph Conrad

27. “It echoed loudly within him because he was hollow at the core.”

— Joseph Conrad

28. “One can’t live with one’s finger everlastingly on one’s pulse.”

— Joseph Conrad

29. “The offing was barred by a black bank of clouds, and the tranquil water-way leading to the uttermost ends of the earth flowed somber under an overcast sky – seemed to lead into the heart of an immense darkness.”

— Joseph Conrad

30. “It is my belief no man ever understands quite his own artful dodges to escape from the grim shadow of self knowledge.”

— Joseph Conrad

31. “The human heart is vast enough to contain all the world.”

— Joseph Conrad

32. “There is nothing more enticing, disenchanting, and enslaving than the life at sea.”

— Joseph Conrad

33. “There is never enough time to say our last word-the last word of our love, of our desire, faith, remorse, submission, revolt.”

— Joseph Conrad

34. “I don’t like work – no man does – but I like what is in the work – the chance to find yourself.”

— Joseph Conrad

35. “I like what is in the work – the chance to find yourself.”

— Joseph Conrad

36. “A writer without interest or sympathy for the foibles of his fellow man is not conceivable as a writer.”

— Joseph Conrad

37. “He cried in a whisper at some image, at some vision – he cried out twice, a cry that was no more than a breath: “’The horror! The horror!”

— Joseph Conrad

38. “Any fool can carry on, but a wise man knows how to shorten sail in time.”

— Joseph Conrad

39. “All roads are long which lead to one’s heart’s desire.”

— Joseph Conrad

40. “Like a flash of lightning between the clouds, we live in the flicker.”

— Joseph Conrad

41. “No, it is impossible; it is impossible to convey the life-sensation of any given epoch of one’s existence – that which makes its truth, its meaning – its subtle and penetrating essence. It is impossible. We live, as we dream – alone.”

— Joseph Conrad

42. “Your strength is just an accident owed to the weakness of others.”

— Joseph Conrad

43. “I have a voice, too, and for good or evil mine is the speech that cannot be silenced.”

— Joseph Conrad

44. “Action is consolatory. It is the enemy of thought and the friend of flattering illusions.”

— Joseph Conrad

45. “To have his path made clear for him is the aspiration of every human being in our beclouded and tempestuous existence.”

— Joseph Conrad

46. “My task is to make you hear, feel and see. That and no more, and that is everything.”

— Joseph Conrad

47. “I was constantly watching myself, my secret self, as dependent on my actions as my own personality.”

— Joseph Conrad

48. “What makes mankind tragic is not that they are the victims of nature, it is that they are conscious of it.”

— Joseph Conrad

49. “I have wrestled with death. It is the most unexciting contest you can imagine. It takes place in an impalpable greyness, with nothing underfoot, with nothing around, without spectators, without clamour, without glory, without the great desire of victory, without the great fear of defeat, in a sickly atmostphere of tepid scepticism, without much belief in your own right, and still less in that of your adversary.”

— Joseph Conrad

50. “He did not care what the end would be, and in his lucid moments overvalued his indifference. The danger, when not seen, has the imperfect vagueness of human thought. The fear grows shadowy; and Imagination, the enemy of men, the father of all terrors, unstimulated, sinks to rest in the dullness of exhausted emotion.”

— Joseph Conrad