Top 500 Joseph Conrad Quotes (2024 Update)
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151. “Perhaps on some quiet night the tremor of far-off drums, sinking, swelling, a tremor vast, faint; a sound weird, appealing, suggestive and wild – and perhaps with as profound a meaning as the sound of bells in a Christian country.”

— Joseph Conrad

152. “I have wrestled with death. It is the most unexciting contest you can imagine.”

— Joseph Conrad

153. “I sit down religiously every morning, I sit down for eight hours every day – and the sitting down is all.”

— Joseph Conrad

154. “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

155. “I take it, no fool ever made a bargain for his soul with the devil: the fool is too much of a fool, or the devil too much of a devil – I don’t know which.”

— Joseph Conrad

156. “There is something haunting in the light of the moon.”

— Joseph Conrad

157. “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

158. “The East Wind, an interloper in the dominions of Westerly Weather, is an impassive-faced tyrant with a sharp poniard held behind his back for a treacherous stab.”

— Joseph Conrad

159. “The Nellie, a cruising yawl, swung to her anchor without a flutter of the sails, and was at rest. The flood had made, the wind was nearly calm, and being bound down the river, the only thing for it was to come and wait for the turn of the tide.”

— Joseph Conrad

160. “The day was ending in a serenity of still and exquisite brilliance. The water shone pacifically; the sky, without a speck, was a benign immensity of unstained light; the very mist on the Essex marshes was like a gauzy and radiant fabric, hung from the wooded rises inland, and draping the low shores in diaphanous folds. Only the gloom to the west, brooding over the upper reaches, became more sombre every minute, as if angered by the approach of the sun.”

— Joseph Conrad

161. “Live rightly, die nobly.”

— Joseph Conrad

162. “A caricature is putting the face of a joke on the body of a truth.”

— Joseph Conrad

163. “There is a subtle and unmistakable touch of love and pride, beyond mere skill, almost an inspiration which gives to all work that finish which is almost art – which is art.”

— Joseph Conrad

164. “A train of thought is never false. The falsehood lies deep in the necessities of existence.”

— Joseph Conrad

165. “His was an impenetrable darkness. I looked at him as you peer down at a man who is lying at the bottom of a precipice where the sun never shines.”

— Joseph Conrad

166. “What saves us is efficiency – the devotion to efficiency.”

— Joseph Conrad

167. “The earth for us is a place to live in, where we must put up with sights, with sounds, with smells too, by Jove! – breathe dead hippo, so to speak, and not be contaminated.”

— Joseph Conrad

168. “A man’s real life is that accorded to him in the thoughts of other men by reason of respect or natural love.”

— Joseph Conrad

169. “In the destructive element immerse.”

— Joseph Conrad

170. “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

171. “Love and regret go hand in hand in this world of changes swifter than the shifting of the clouds reflected in the mirror of the sea.”

— Joseph Conrad

172. “I had no particular desire to enlighten them, but I had some difficulty in restraining myself from laughing in their faces, so full of stupid importance.”

— Joseph Conrad

173. “Necessity, they say, is mother of invention, but fear, too, is not barren of ingenious suggestions.”

— Joseph Conrad

174. “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

175. “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

176. “He hated all this, and somehow he couldn’t get away.”

— Joseph Conrad

177. “They had behind them, to my mind, the terrific suggestiveness of words heard in dreams, of phrases spoken in nightmares.”

— Joseph Conrad

178. “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

179. “And at last, in its curved and imperceptible fall, the sun sank low, and from glowing white changed to a dull red without rays and without heat, as if about to go out suddenly, stricken to death by the touch of that gloom brooding over a crowd of men.”

— Joseph Conrad

180. “In plucking the fruit of memory one runs the risk of spoiling its bloom, especially if it has got to be carried into the market.”

— Joseph Conrad

181. “The real significance of crime is in its being a breach of faith with the community of mankind.”

— Joseph Conrad

182. “But what I felt most was my being a stranger to the ship; and if all the truth must be told, I was somewhat of a stranger to myself.”

— Joseph Conrad

183. “The word ‘ivory’ rang in the air, was whispered, was sighed. You would think they were praying to it. A taint of imbecile rapacity blew through it all, like a whiff from some corpse.”

— Joseph Conrad

184. “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

185. “Men who come out here should have no entrails.”

— Joseph Conrad

186. “The idleness of a passenger, my isolation amongst all these men with whom I had no point of contact, the oily and languid sea, the uniform sombreness of the coast, seemed to keep me away from the truth of these things, within the toil of a mournful and senseless delusion. The voice of the surf now and then was a positive pleasure, like the speech of a brother. It was something natural, that had its reason, that had a meaning.”

— Joseph Conrad

187. “Don’t you forget what’s divine in the Russian soul and that’s resignation.”

— Joseph Conrad

188. “Words, as is well known, are the great foes of reality.”

— Joseph Conrad

189. “This man suffered too much. He hated all this, and somehow he couldn’t get away. When I had a chance I begged him to try and leave while there was time; I offered to go back with him. And he would say yes, and then he would remain...”

— Joseph Conrad

190. “I think it had whispered to him things about himself which he did not know, things of which he had no conception till he took counsel with this great solitude – and the whisper had proved irresistibly fascinating. It echoed loudly within him because he was hollow at the core.”

— Joseph Conrad

191. “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

192. “The edge of a colossal jungle, so dark-green as to be almost black, fringed with white surf, ran straight, like a ruled line, far, far, away along blue sea whose glitter was blurred by a creeping mist.”

— Joseph Conrad

193. “Some of us, regarding the ocean with understanding and affection, have seen it looking old, as if the immemorial ages had been stirred up from the undisturbed bottom of ooze. For it is a gale of wind that makes the sea look old.”

— Joseph Conrad

194. “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

195. “This magnificent butterfly finds a little heap of dirt and sits still on it; but man will never on his heap of mud keep still.”

— Joseph Conrad

196. “Thinking is the great enemy of perfection. The habit of profound reflection, I am compelled to say, is the most pernicious of all the habits formed by the civilized man.”

— Joseph Conrad

197. “Everything belonged to him. It made me hold my breath in expectation of hearing the wilderness burst into prodigious peal of laughter that would shake the fixed stars in their places.”

— Joseph Conrad

198. “We owe much to the fruitful meditation of our sages, but a sane view of life is, after all, elaborated mainly in the kitchen.”

— Joseph Conrad

199. “A certain simplicity of thought is common to serene souls at both ends of the social scale.”

— Joseph Conrad

200. “It occurred to me that my speech or my silence, indeed any action of mine, would be a mere futility.”

— Joseph Conrad