Top 500 Joseph Conrad Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “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

52. “Conrad placed on the title page an epigraph taken from Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene: “Sleep after toyle, port after stormie seas, Ease after warre, death after life, does greatly please” This also became Conrad’s epitaph.”

— Joseph Conrad

53. “In a few moments all the stars came out above the intense blackness of the earth and the great lagoon gleaming suddenly with reflected lights resembled an oval patch of night sky flung down into the hopeless and abysmal night of the wilderness.”

— Joseph Conrad

54. “Morituri te salutant!”

— Joseph Conrad

55. “When one has got to make correct entries, one comes to hate those savages – hate them to the death.”

— Joseph Conrad

56. “You can’t breathe dead hippo waking, sleeping, and eating, and at the same time keep your precarious grip on existence.”

— Joseph Conrad

57. “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

58. “The reaches opened before us and closed behind, as if the forest had stepped leisurely across the water to bar the way for our return. We penetrated deeper and deeper into the heart of darkness.”

— Joseph Conrad

59. “Follow your bliss. Find where it is and don’t be afraid to follow it.”

— Joseph Conrad

60. “Give me the right word and the right accent and I will move the world.”

— Joseph Conrad

61. “But passion most dissembles, yet betrays, Even by its darkness; as the blackest sky Foretells the heaviest tempest.”

— Joseph Conrad

62. “A ship in dock, surrounded by quays and the walls of warehouses, has the appearance of a prisoner meditating upon freedom in the sadness of a free spirit put under restraint.”

— Joseph Conrad

63. “The air of the New World seems favorable to the art of declamation.”

— Joseph Conrad

64. “Everything can be found at sea according to the spirit of your quest.”

— Joseph Conrad

65. “In order to move others deeply we must deliberately allow ourselves to be carried away beyond the bounds of our normal sensibility.”

— Joseph Conrad

66. “Even extreme grief may ultimately vent itself in violence – but more generally takes the form of apathy.”

— Joseph Conrad

67. “Protection is the first necessity of opulence and luxury.”

— Joseph Conrad

68. “Destiny. My destiny! Droll thing life is – that mysterious arrangement of merciless logic for a futile purpose.”

— Joseph Conrad

69. “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

70. “True, he had made that last stride, he had stepped over the edge, while I had been permitted to draw back my hesitating foot. And perhaps in this is the whole difference; perhaps all the wisdom, and all truth, and all sincerity, are just compressed into that inappreciable moment of time in which we step over the threshold of the invisible.”

— Joseph Conrad

71. “He resembled a pilot, which to a seaman is trustworthiness personified.”

— Joseph Conrad

72. “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

73. “All that mysterious life of the wilderness that stirs in the forest, in the jungles, in the hearts of wild men.”

— Joseph Conrad

74. “As a general rule, a reputation is built on manner as much as on achievement.”

— Joseph Conrad

75. “Kisses are the remnants of paradise.”

— Joseph Conrad

76. “And perhaps in this is the whole difference; perhaps all the wisdom, and all truth, and all sincerity, are just compressed into that inappreciable moment of time in which we step over the threshold of the invisible.”

— Joseph Conrad

77. “Never test another man by your own weakness.”

— Joseph Conrad

78. “The blight of futility that lies in wait for men’s speeches had fallen upon our conversation and made it a thing of empty sounds.”

— Joseph Conrad

79. “Reality, as usual, beats fiction out of sight.”

— Joseph Conrad

80. “All ambitions are lawful except those which climb upward on the miseries or credulities of mankind.”

— Joseph Conrad

81. “Vanity plays lurid tricks with our memory, and the truth of every passion wants some pretence to make it live.”

— Joseph Conrad

82. “We can never cease to be ourselves.”

— Joseph Conrad

83. “Fiction is history, human history, or it is nothing.”

— Joseph Conrad

84. “Vanity plays lurid tricks with our memory.”

— Joseph Conrad

85. “Midway upon the journey of our life I found myself within a forest dark, For the straight-forward pathway had been lost.”

— Joseph Conrad

86. “It seems to me I am trying to tell you a dream – making a vain attempt, because no relation of a dream can convey the dream-sensation, that commingling of absurdity, surprise, and bewilderment in a tremor of struggling revolt, that notion of being captured by the incredible which is of the very essence of dreams.”

— Joseph Conrad

87. “I always went my own road and on my own legs where I had a mind to go.”

— Joseph Conrad

88. “Watching a coast as it slips by the ship is like thinking about an enigma. There it is before you, smiling, frowning, inviting, grand, mean, insipid, or savage, and always mute with an air of whispering, “Come and find out”.”

— Joseph Conrad

89. “For the great mass of mankind the only saving grace that is needed is steady fidelity to what is nearest to hand and heart in the short moment of each human effort.”

— Joseph Conrad

90. “A fool has more ideas than a wise man can foresee.”

— Joseph Conrad

91. “An author writes only half the book. The rest is written by readers.”

— Joseph Conrad

92. “The man who says that he has no illusions has at least that one.”

— Joseph Conrad

93. “All a man can betray is his conscience.”

— Joseph Conrad

94. “Every age is fed on illusions, lest men should renounce life early and the human race come to an end.”

— Joseph Conrad

95. “We talk with indignation or enthusiasm; we talk about oppression, cruelty, crime, devotion, self-sacrifice, virtue, and we know nothing real beyond the words. Nobody knows what suffering or sacrifice mean – except, perhaps the victims of the mysterious purpose of these illusions.”

— Joseph Conrad

96. “It is when we try to grapple with another man’s intimate need that we perceive how incomprehensible, wavering, and misty are the beings that share with us the sight of the stars and the warmth of the sun.”

— Joseph Conrad

97. “I do not know whether I have been a good seaman, but I know I have been a very faithful one.”

— Joseph Conrad

98. “Each blade of grass has its spot on earth whence it draws its life, its strength; and so is man rooted to the land from which he draws his faith together with his life.”

— Joseph Conrad

99. “They talk of a man betraying his country, his friends, his sweetheart. There must be a moral bond first. All a man can betray is his conscience.”

— Joseph Conrad

100. “The world of finance is a mysterious world in which, incredible as the fact may appear, evaporation precedes liquidation.”

— Joseph Conrad