Top 500 Joseph Conrad Quotes (2024 Update)
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251. “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

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

— Joseph Conrad

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

— Joseph Conrad

254. “The value of a sentence is the personality that utters’t, for nothing new can be said by any man or woman.”

— Joseph Conrad

255. “All one’s work might have been better done; but this is a sort of reflection a worker must put aside courageously if he doesn’t mean every one of his conceptions to remain forever a private vision, an evanescent reverie.”

— Joseph Conrad

256. “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

257. “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

258. “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

259. “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

260. “I have been called romantic. Well, that can’t be helped. But stay. I seem to remember that I have been called a realist also. And as that charge too can be made out, let us try to live up to it, at whatever cost, for a change.”

— Joseph Conrad

261. “The sea – this truth must be confessed – has no generosity. No display of manly qualities – courage, hardihood, endurance, faithfulness – has ever been known to touch its irresponsible consciousness of power.”

— Joseph Conrad

262. “The humblest craft that floats makes its appeal to a seaman by the faithfulness of her life.”

— Joseph Conrad

263. “It was not my strength that wanted nursing, it was my imagination that wanted soothing.”

— Joseph Conrad

264. “I looked around, and I don’t know why, but I assure you that never, never before, did this land, this river, this jungle, the very arch of this blazing sky, appear to me so hopeless and so dark, so impenetrable to human thought, so pitiless to human weakness.”

— Joseph Conrad

265. “Toodles looked so thunderstruck that the Assistant Commissioner smiled faintly.”

— Joseph Conrad

266. “The terrorist and the policeman both come from the same basket.”

— Joseph Conrad

267. “As to honor – you know – it’s a very fine mediaeval inheritance which women never got hold of. It wasn’t theirs.”

— Joseph Conrad

268. “There are men here and there to whom the whole of life is like an after-dinner hour with a cigar; easy, pleasant, empty, perhaps enlivened by some fable of strife to be forgotten – before the end is told – even if there happens to be any end to it.”

— Joseph Conrad

269. “A nickname may be the best record of a success. That’s what I call putting the face of a joke upon the body of a truth.”

— Joseph Conrad

270. “Jim’s father possessed such certain knowledge of the Unknowable as made for the righteousness of people in cottages without disturbing the ease of mind of those whom an unerring Providence enables to live in mansions.”

— Joseph Conrad

271. “There is no credulity so eager and blind as the credulity of covetousness, which, in its universal extent, measures the moral misery and the intellectual destitution of mankind.”

— Joseph Conrad

272. “The commonest sort of fortitude prevents us from becoming criminals in a legal sense; it is from weakness unknown, but perhaps suspected, as in some parts of the world you suspect a deadly snake in every bush – from weakness that may lie hidden, watched or unwatched, prayed against or manfully scorned, repressed or maybe ignored more than half a lifetime, not one of us is safe.”

— Joseph Conrad

273. “Conrad’s distrust of democracy sprang from his doubts whether the propagation of democracy as an aim in itself could solve any problems. He thought that, in view of the weakness of human nature and of the “criminal” character of society, democracy offered boundless opportunities for demagogues and charlatans.”

— Joseph Conrad

274. “It is very difficult to be wholly joyous or wholly sad on this earth. The comic, when he is human, soon takes upon itself the face of pain.”

— Joseph Conrad

275. “It is not Justice the servant of men, but accident, hazard, Fortune-the ally of patient Time-that holds an even and scrupulous balance.”

— Joseph Conrad

276. “A certain readiness to perish is not so very rare, but it is seldom that you meet men whose souls, steeled in the impenetrable armour of resolution, are ready to fight a losing battle to the last, the desire of peace waxes stronger as hope declines, till at last it conquers the very desire of life. Which of us here has not observed this, or maybe experienced something of that feeling in his own person – this extreme weariness of emotions, the vanity of effort, the yearning for rest?”

— Joseph Conrad

277. “The fascination of the abomination – you know.”

— Joseph Conrad

278. “Walking to the taffrail, I was in time to make out, on the very edge of a darkness thrown by a towering black mass like the very gateway of Erebus – yes, I was in time to catch an evanescent glimpse of my white hat left behind to mark the spot where the secret sharer of my cabin and of my thoughts, as though he were my second self, had lowered himself into the water to take his punishment: a free man, a proud swimmer striking out for a new destiny.”

— Joseph Conrad

279. “A horn tooted to the right, and I saw the black people run.”

— Joseph Conrad

280. “His very existence was improbable, inexplicable, and altogether bewildering. He was an insoluble problem. It was inconceivable how he had existed, how he had succeeded in getting so far, how he had managed to remain – why he did not instantly disappear.”

— Joseph Conrad

281. “Mathematics commands all my respect, but I have no use for engines.”

— Joseph Conrad

282. “In Russia, the land of spectral ideas and disembodied aspirations, many brave minds have turned away at last from the vain and endless conflict to the one great historical fact of the land. They turned to autocracy for the peace of their patriotic conscience as a weary unbeliever, touched by grace, turns to the faith of his fathers for the blessing of spiritual rest. Like other Russians before him, Razumov, in conflict with himself, felt the touch of grace upon his forehead.”

— Joseph Conrad

283. “I am not such a fool as I look, quoth Plato to his disciples.”

— Joseph Conrad

284. “We felt meditative, and fit for nothing but placid staring. 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 marsh was like a gauzy and radiant fabric, hung from the wooded rises inland, and draping the low shores in diaphanous folds.”

— Joseph Conrad

285. “It was one of those dewy, clear, starry nights, oppressing our spirit, crushing our pride, by the brilliant evidence of the awful loneliness, of the hopeless obscure insignificance of our globe lost in the splendid revelation of a glittering, soulless universe.”

— Joseph Conrad

286. “But when one is young one must see things, gather experience, ideas; enlarge the mind.”

— Joseph Conrad

287. “And when it is accomplished – behold! – all the truth of life is there: a moment of vision, a sigh, a smile – and the return to an eternal rest.”

— Joseph Conrad

288. “You know I hate, detest, and can’t bear a lie, not because I am straighter than the rest of us, but simply because it appals me. 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. It makes me miserable and sick, like biting something rotten would do. Temperament, I suppose.”

— Joseph Conrad

289. “Who would care to question the ground of forgiveness or compassion.”

— Joseph Conrad

290. “The making of a fortune cannot be achieved without some roughness. It is a matter of temperament.”

— Joseph Conrad

291. “Joy and sorrow in this world pass into each other, mingling their forms and their murmurs in the twilight of life as mysterious as an overshadowed ocean, while the dazzling brightness of supreme hopes lies far off, fascinating and still, on the distant edge of the horizon.”

— Joseph Conrad

292. “There are the girls we love, the men we look up to, the tenderness, the friendships, the opportunities, the pleasures! But the fact remains that you must touch your reward with clean hands, lest it turn to dead leaves, to thorns, in your grasp.”

— Joseph Conrad

293. “Government in general, any government anywhere, is a thing of exquisite comicality to a discerning mind.”

— Joseph Conrad

294. “It was solemn, and a little ridiculous too, as they always are, those struggles of an individual trying to save from the fire his idea of what his moral identity should be, this precious notion of a convention, only one of the rules of the game, nothing more, but all the same so terribly effective by its assumption of unlimited power over natural instincts, by the awful penalties of its failure.”

— Joseph Conrad

295. “She left a lingering smudge of smoke on the sky, and two vanishing trails of foam on the water.”

— Joseph Conrad

296. “The use of reason is to justify the obscure desires that move our conduct, impulses, passions, prejudices and follies, and also our fears.”

— Joseph Conrad

297. “Truth of a modest sort I can promise you, and also sincerity. That complete, praiseworthy sincerity which, while it delivers one into the hands of one’s enemies, is as likely as not to embroil one with one’s friends.”

— Joseph Conrad

298. “Nowhere else than upon the sea do the days, weeks, and months fall away quicker into the past. They seem to be left astern as easily as the light air-bubbles in the swirls of the ship’s wake.”

— Joseph Conrad

299. “As in political so in literary action a man wins friends for himself mostly by the passion of his prejudices and the consistent narrowness of his outlook.”

— Joseph Conrad

300. “You perceive the force of a word. 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... Give me the right word and the right accent and I will move the world.”

— Joseph Conrad