Top 500 Joseph Conrad Quotes (2024 Update)
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201. “The sight of it made the earth seem unearthly. They were accustomed to look upon the shackled form of a conquered monster, but there – there you could look at a thing monstrous, beautiful, and free.”

— Joseph Conrad

202. “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

203. “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

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. “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

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

— 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. “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

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

— Joseph Conrad

211. “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

212. “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

213. “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

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

— Joseph Conrad

215. “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

216. “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

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

— Joseph Conrad

218. “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

219. “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

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. “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

223. “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

224. “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

225. “To the destruction of what is.”

— Joseph Conrad

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

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

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

— Joseph Conrad

231. “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

232. “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

233. “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

234. “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

235. “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

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

— Joseph Conrad

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

— Joseph Conrad

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

— Joseph Conrad

239. “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

240. “The word ‘ivory’ rang in the air, was whispered, was sighed. You would think they were praying to it.”

— Joseph Conrad

241. “To be a great autocrat you must be a great barbarian.”

— Joseph Conrad

242. “There is a taint of death, a flavour of mortality in lies – which is exactly what I hate and detest in the world – what I want to forget.”

— 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. “Resignation, not mystic, not detached, but resignation open-eyed, conscious, and informed by love, is the only one of our feelings for which it is impossible to become a sham.”

— Joseph Conrad

245. “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

246. “He was just a word for me. I did not see the man in the name any more than you do. Do you see him? Do you see the story? Do you see anything?”

— Joseph Conrad

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

— Joseph Conrad

248. “They trespassed upon my thoughts. They were intruders whose knowledge of life was to me an irritating pretense, because I felt so sure they could not possibly know the things I knew. Their bearing, which was simply the bearing of commonplace individuals going about their business in the assurance of perfect safety, was offensive to me like the outrageous flauntings of folly in the face of a danger it is unable to comprehend. 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

249. “His need was to exist, and to move onwards at the greatest possible risk, and with maximum of privation. If the absolutely pure, uncalculating, unpractical spirit of adventure had ever ruled a human being, it ruled this bepatched youth.”

— Joseph Conrad

250. “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