Top 500 Joseph Conrad Quotes (2024 Update)
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201. “Man, we know, cannot live by bread alone but hang me if I don’t believe that some women could live by love alone.”

— Joseph Conrad

202. “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

203. “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

204. “No fear can stand up to hunger, no patience can wear it out, disgust simply does not exist where hunger is; and as to superstition, beliefs, and what you may call principles, they are less than chaff in a breeze.”

— Joseph Conrad

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

— Joseph Conrad

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

— Joseph Conrad

207. “Of all the inanimate objects, of all men’s creations, books are the nearest to us for they contain our very thoughts, our ambitions, our indignations, our illusions, our fidelity to the truth, and our persistent leanings to error. But most of all they resemble us in their precious hold on life.”

— Joseph Conrad

208. “Thames stretched before us like the beginning of an interminable waterway. In the offing the sea and the sky were welded.”

— Joseph Conrad

209. “The last thing a woman will consent to in a man whom she loves, or on whom she simply depends, is want of courage.”

— Joseph Conrad

210. “Fatalism is born of the fear of failure, for we all believe that we carry success in our own hands, and we suspect that our hands are weak.”

— Joseph Conrad

211. “The atmosphere of officialdom would kill anything that breathes the air of human endeavour, would extinguish hope and fear alike in the supremacy of paper and ink.”

— Joseph Conrad

212. “The discovery of America was the occasion of the greatest outburst of cruelty and reckless greed known in history.”

— Joseph Conrad

213. “A word carries far, very far, deals destruction through time as the bullets go flying through space.”

— Joseph Conrad

214. “Society was calling to its accomplished child to come, to be taken care of, to be instructed, to be judged, to be condemned; it called him to return to that rubbish heap from which he had wandered away, so that justice could be done.”

— Joseph Conrad

215. “He was ruined in every way, but a man possessed of passion is not a bankrupt in life.”

— Joseph Conrad

216. “Over the lives borne from under the shadow of death there seems to fall the shadow of madness.”

— Joseph Conrad

217. “I can’t tell if a straw ever saved a drowning man, but I know that a mere glance is enough to make dspair pause. For in truth, we who are creatures of impulse, are creatures of despair.”

— Joseph Conrad

218. “The Westerly Wind asserting his sway from the south-west quarter is often like a monarch gone mad, driving forth with wild imprecations the most faithful of his courtiers to shipwreck, disaster, and death.”

— Joseph Conrad

219. “One writes only half the book; the other half is with the reader.”

— Joseph Conrad

220. “We felt meditative, and fit for nothing but placid staring.”

— Joseph Conrad

221. “Rich or poor, strong or weak, who among us has not begged God for a second chance?”

— Joseph Conrad

222. “It seems to me that all my life before that momentous day is infinitely remote, a fading memory of light-hearted youth, something on the other side of a shadow.”

— Joseph Conrad

223. “I don’t like work – no man does – but I like what is in the work – the chance to find yourself. Your own reality – for yourself not for others – what no other man can ever know. They can only see the mere show, and never can tell what it really means.”

— Joseph Conrad

224. “A task, any task, undertaken in an adventurous spirit acquires the merit of romance.”

— Joseph Conrad

225. “He was there below me, and, upon my word, to look at him was as edifying as seeing a dog in a parody of breeches and a featherhat, walking on his hind legs.”

— Joseph Conrad

226. “He must meet that truth with his own true stuff – with his own inborn strength. Principles? Principles won’t do. Acquisitions, clothes, pretty rags – rags that would fly off at the first good shake. No; you want a deliberate belief.”

— Joseph Conrad

227. “And there’s another thing: a man should stand up to his bad luck, to his mistakes, to his conscience and all that sort of thing. Why – what else would you have to fight against.”

— Joseph Conrad

228. “We wander in our thousands over the face of the earth, the illustrious and the obscure, earning beyond the seas our fame, our money, only a crust of bread; but it seems to me that for each of us going home must be like going to render an account.”

— Joseph Conrad

229. “History repeats itself, but the special call of an art which has passed away is never reproduced. It is as utterly gone out of the world as the song of a destroyed wild bird.”

— Joseph Conrad

230. “Principles? Principles won’t do. Acquisitions, clothes, pretty rags – rags that would fly off at the first good shake. No; you want a deliberate belief.”

— Joseph Conrad

231. “The way of even the most jusitifiable revolution is prepared by personal impulses disguised into creeds.”

— Joseph Conrad

232. “To cut oneself entirely from one’s kind is impossible. To live in a desert one must be a saint.”

— Joseph Conrad

233. “I remembered the old doctor, – “It would be interesting for science to watch the mental changes of individuals, on the spot.” I felt I was becoming scientifically interesting.”

— Joseph Conrad

234. “I wondered how far I should turn out faithful to that ideal conception of one’s own personality every man sets up for himself secretly.”

— Joseph Conrad

235. “But the snags were thick, the water was treacherous and shallow, the boiler seemed indeed to have a sulky devil in it, and thus neither that fireman nor I had any time to peer into our creepy thoughts.”

— Joseph Conrad

236. “To the destruction of what is.”

— Joseph Conrad

237. “A man’s most open actions have a secret side to them.”

— Joseph Conrad

238. “No, I don’t like work. I had rather laze about and think of all the fine things that can be done. I don’t like work – no man does – but I like what is in the work, – the chance to find yourself. Your own reality – for yourself, not for others – what no other man can ever know. They can only see the mere show, and never can tell what it really means.”

— Joseph Conrad

239. “Nobody looked at him. He passed on unsuspected and deadly, like a pest in the street full of men.”

— Joseph Conrad

240. “Nothing is more painful than the shock of sharp contradictions that lacerate our intelligence and our feelings.”

— Joseph Conrad

241. “I don’t think a single one of them had any clear idea of time, as we at the end of countless ages have. They still belonged to the beginnings of time –.”

— Joseph Conrad

242. “I was anxious to deal with this shadow by myself alone – and to this day I don’t know why I was so jealous of sharing with any one the peculiar blackness of that experience.”

— Joseph Conrad

243. “It is to be remarked that a good many people are born curiously unfitted for the fate waiting them on this earth.”

— Joseph Conrad

244. “They wanted facts. Facts! They demanded facts from him, as if facts could explain anything!”

— Joseph Conrad

245. “For history is made with tools, not with ideas; and everything is changed by economic conditions – art, philosophy, love, virtue – truth itself!”

— Joseph Conrad

246. “That faculty of beholding at a hint the face of his desire and the shape of his dream, without which the earth would know no lover and no adventurer.”

— Joseph Conrad

247. “What is a novel if not a conviction of our fellow men’s existence strong enough to take upon itself a form of imagined life clearer than reality and whose accumulated verisimilitude of selected episodes puts to shame the pride of documentary history.”

— Joseph Conrad

248. “I am afraid that if you want to go down into history you’ll have to do something for it.”

— Joseph Conrad

249. “Going home must be like going to render an account.”

— Joseph Conrad

250. “Had you been the Emperor of the East and West, you could not have ignored your inferiority in his presence.”

— Joseph Conrad