Top 500 Joseph Conrad Quotes (2024 Update)
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101. “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

102. “Gossip is what no one claims to like, but everybody enjoys.”

— Joseph Conrad

103. “He had a good healthy sense of meum, and as little of tuum as he could help.”

— Joseph Conrad

104. “It is a maudlin and indecent verity that comes out through the strength of wine.”

— Joseph Conrad

105. “There is a taint of death, a flavour of mortality in lies...”

— Joseph Conrad

106. “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

107. “It is respectable to have no illusions, and safe, and profitable and dull.”

— Joseph Conrad

108. “Sleep after toyle, port after stormie seas, Ease after warre, death after life, does greatly please.”

— Joseph Conrad

109. “Violence is not a catalyst but a diversion.”

— Joseph Conrad

110. “There’s no worse enemy and no better friend than a brother, Tuan, for one brother knows another, and in perfect knowledge is strength for good or evil.”

— Joseph Conrad

111. “In the empty immensity of earth, sky, and water, there she was, incomprehensible, firing into a continent.”

— Joseph Conrad

112. “The old river in its broad reach rested unruffled at the decline of day, after ages of good service done to the race that peopled its banks, spread out in the tranquil dignity of a waterway leading to the uttermost ends of the earth.”

— Joseph Conrad

113. “For a time I would feel I belonged still to a world of straightforward facts; but the feeling would not last long. Something would turn up to scare it away.”

— Joseph Conrad

114. “In some inland post feel the savagery, the utter savagery, had closed round him – all that mysterious life of the wilderness that stirs in the forest, in the jungles, in the hearts of wild men. There’s no initiation either into such mysteries. He has to live in the midst of the incomprehensible, which is detestable. And it has a fascination, too, which goes to work upon him. The fascination of the abomination – you know.”

— Joseph Conrad

115. “I am a great foe of favoritism in public life, in private life, and even in the delicate relationship of an author to his works.”

— Joseph Conrad

116. “They grabbed what they could get for the sake of what was to be got. It was just robbery with violence, aggravated murder on a great scale, and men going at it blind – as is very proper for those who tackle a darkness. 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.”

— Joseph Conrad

117. “It is the mark of an inexperienced man not to believe in luck.”

— Joseph Conrad

118. “A man that is born falls into a dream like a man who falls into the sea. If he tries to climb out into the air as inexperienced people endeavor to do, he drowns.”

— Joseph Conrad

119. “The sea never changes and its works, for all the talks of men, are wrapped in mystery.”

— Joseph Conrad

120. “Imagination, not invention, is the supreme master of art as of life.”

— Joseph Conrad

121. “Fine fellows – cannibals – in their place. They were men one could work with, and I am grateful to them.”

— Joseph Conrad

122. “Who knows what true loneliness is – not the conventional word but the naked terror? To the lonely themselves it wears a mask. The most miserable outcast hugs some memory or some illusion.”

— Joseph Conrad

123. “O youth! The strength of it, the faith of it, the imagination of it! To me she was not an old rattle-trap carting about the world a lot of coal for a freight – to me she was the endeavour, the test, the trial of life. I think of her with pleasure, with affection, with regret – as you would think of someone dead you have loved. I shall never forget her... Pass the bottle.”

— Joseph Conrad

124. “One must explore deep and believe the incredible to find the new particles of truth floating in an ocean of insignificance.”

— Joseph Conrad

125. “Writing in English is like throwing mud at a wall.”

— Joseph Conrad

126. “It made you feel very small, very lost, and yet it was not altogether depressing, that feeling. After all, if you were small, the grimy beetle crawled on – which was just what you wanted it to do.”

— Joseph Conrad

127. “Soul! If anybody had ever struggled with a soul, I am the man. And I wasn’t arguing with a lunatic either. Believe me or not, his intelligence was perfectly clear – concentrated, it is true, upon himself with horrible intensity, yet clear; and therein was my only chance – barring, of course, the killing him there and then, which wasn’t so good, on account of unavoidable noise. But his soul was mad.”

— Joseph Conrad

128. “They were dying slowly – it was very clear. They were not enemies, they were not criminals, they were nothing earthly now, – nothing but black shadows of disease and starvation, lying confusedly in the greenish gloom.”

— Joseph Conrad

129. “The terrorist and the policeman both come from the same basket. Revolution, legality – counter-moves in the same game; forms of idleness at bottom identical.”

— Joseph Conrad

130. “We looked at the venerable stream not in the vivid flush of a short day that comes and departs forever, but in the august light of abiding memories.”

— Joseph Conrad

131. “There’s no initiation either into such mysteries. He has to live in the midst of the incomprehensible, which is also detestable. And it has a fascination, too, that goes to work upon him. The fascination of the abomination – you know, imagine the growing regrets, the longing to escape, the powerless disgust, the surrender, the hate.”

— Joseph Conrad

132. “Like a running blaze on a plain, like a flash of lightning in the clouds. We live in the flicker.”

— Joseph Conrad

133. “They were dying slowly – it was very clear. They were not enemies, they were not criminals, they were nothing earthly now – nothing but black shadows of disease and starvation, lying confusedly in the greenish gloom. Brought from all the recesses of the coast in all the legality of time contracts, lost in uncongenial surroundings, fed on unfamiliar food, they sickened, became inefficient, and were then allowed to crawl away and rest.”

— Joseph Conrad

134. “I couldn’t have felt more of lonely desolation somehow, had I been robbed of a belief or had missed my destiny in life...”

— Joseph Conrad

135. “Madness alone is truly terrifying, inasmuch as you cannot placate it by threats, persuasion, or bribes.”

— Joseph Conrad

136. “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

137. “It would take too long to explain the intimate alliance of contradictions in human nature which makes love itself wear at times the desperate shape of betrayal. And perhaps there is no possible explanation.”

— Joseph Conrad

138. “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

139. “We are accustomed to look upon the shackled form of a conquered monster, but there – there you could look at a thing monstrous and free. It was unearthly, and the men were – No, they were not inhuman. Well, you know, that was the worst of it – this suspicion.”

— Joseph Conrad

140. “It was as though an animated image of death carved out of old ivory had been shaking its hand with menaces at a motionless crowd of men made of dark and glittering bronze.”

— Joseph Conrad

141. “Action is consolatory. It is the enemy of thought and the friend of flattering illusions. Only in the conduct of our action can we find the sense of mastery over the Fates.”

— Joseph Conrad

142. “How does one kill fear, I wonder? How do you shoot a specter through the heart, slash off its spectral head, take it by its spectral throat?”

— Joseph Conrad

143. “And this also,” said Marlow suddenly, “has been one of the dark places of the earth.”

— Joseph Conrad

144. “We were wanderers on a prehistoric earth, on an earth that wore the aspect of an unknown planet.”

— Joseph Conrad

145. “Going up that river was like travelling back to the earliest beginnings of the world, when vegetation rioted on the earth and the big trees were kings. An empty stream, a great silence, an impenetrable forest. The air was warm, thick, heavy, sluggish. There was no joy in the brilliance of sunshine. The long stretches of the waterway ran on, deserted, into the gloom of overshadowed distances.”

— Joseph Conrad

146. “Any work that aspires, however humbly, to the condition of art should carry its justification in every line.”

— Joseph Conrad

147. “The very young have, properly speaking, no moments. It is the privilege of early youth to live in advance of its days in all the beautiful continuity of hope which knows no pauses and no introspection.”

— Joseph Conrad

148. “I saw him open his mouth wide – it gave him a weirdly voracious aspect, as though he had wanted to swallow all the air, all the earth, all the men before him.”

— Joseph Conrad

149. “He has to live in the midst of the incomprehensible, which is also detestable.”

— Joseph Conrad

150. “The ocean has the conscienceless temper of a savage autocrat spoiled by much adulation.”

— Joseph Conrad