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

252. “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

253. “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

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

— Joseph Conrad

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

— Joseph Conrad

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

— Joseph Conrad

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

— Joseph Conrad

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

— Joseph Conrad

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

— Joseph Conrad

260. “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

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

— Joseph Conrad

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

— Joseph Conrad

263. “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

264. “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

265. “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

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

— Joseph Conrad

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

— Joseph Conrad

268. “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

269. “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

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

— Joseph Conrad

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

— Joseph Conrad

272. “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

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

— Joseph Conrad

274. “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

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. “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

277. “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

278. “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

279. “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

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

— Joseph Conrad

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

— Joseph Conrad

283. “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

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

— Joseph Conrad

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

— Joseph Conrad

286. “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

287. “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

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. “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

290. “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

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

— Joseph Conrad

292. “The beauty of the loved woman exists in the beauties of Nature.”

— Joseph Conrad

293. “Nobody, nobody is good enough.”

— Joseph Conrad

294. “And for a moment it seemed to me as if I also were buried in a vast grave full of unspeakable secrets.”

— Joseph Conrad

295. “I suppose everybody must be always just a little homesick.”

— Joseph Conrad

296. “I said; ‘his example too. Yes, his example. I forgot that.’ “‘But I do not. I cannot – I.”

— Joseph Conrad

297. “One rule holds good of most young men – whether rich or poor. They never have money for the necessaries of life, but they have always money to spare for their caprices – an anomaly which finds its explanation in their youth and in the almost frantic eagerness with which youth grasps at pleasure.”

— Joseph Conrad

298. “You can’t, in sound morals, condemn a man for taking care of his own integrity. It is his clear duty.”

— Joseph Conrad

299. “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

300. “Books may be written in all sorts of places. Verbal inspiration may enter the berth of a mariner on board a ship frozen fast in a river in the middle of a town.”

— Joseph Conrad