Top 500 Joseph Conrad Quotes (2026 Update)
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401. “Don Jose Avellanos depended very much upon the devotion of his beloved Antonia. He accepted it in the benighted way of men, who, though made in God’s image, are like stone idols without sense before the smoke of certain burnt offerings.”

— Joseph Conrad

402. “The good author is he who contemplates without marked joy or excessive sorrow the adventures of his soul amongst criticisms.”

— Joseph Conrad

403. “The man who can’t do most things and won’t do the rest.”

— Joseph Conrad

404. “I did not betray Mr. Kurtz – it was ordered I should never betray him – it was written I should be loyal to the nightmare of my choice. 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 anyone the peculiar blackness of that experience.”

— Joseph Conrad

405. “The condemned social order has not been built up on paper and ink, and I don’t fancy that a combination of paper and ink will ever put an end to it.”

— Joseph Conrad

406. “Formerly, in solitude and in silence, he had been used to think clearly and sometimes even profoundly, seeing life outside the flattering optical delusion of everlasting hope, of conventional self-deceptions, of an ever-expected happiness.”

— Joseph Conrad

407. “This is glorious!′ I cried, and then i looked at the sinner by my side. He sat with his head sunk on his breast and said ‘Yes’, without raising his eyes, as if afraid to see writ large on the clear sky of the offing the reproach of his romantic conscience.”

— Joseph Conrad

408. “Time had past indeed: it had overtaken him and gone ahead. It had left him hopelessly behind with a few poor gifts: the iron grey hair, the heavy fatigue of the tanned face, two scars, a pair of tarnished shoulderstraps; one of those steady, reliable men who are the raw material of great reputations, one of those unaccounted lives that are buried without drums and trumpets under the foundations of monumental success.”

— Joseph Conrad

409. “She had said he had been driven away from her by a dream...”

— Joseph Conrad

410. “The field of influence was great and infinitely varied – once one had conquered a name.”

— Joseph Conrad

411. “We were wanderers on a prehistoric earth, on an earth that wore the aspect of an unknown planet. We could have fancied ourselves the first of men taking possession of an accursed inheritance, to be subdued at the cost of profound anguish and of excessive toil.”

— Joseph Conrad

412. “Are not our lives too short for that full utterance which through all our stammerings is of course our only and abiding intention? I have given up expecting those last words, whose ring, if they could only be pronounced, would shake both heaven and earth. There is never time to say our last word – the last word of our love, of our desire, faith, remorse, submission, revolt. The heaven and earth must not be shaken. I suppose – at least, not by us who know so many truths about either.”

— Joseph Conrad

413. “The encounter did not leave behind with Chief Inspector Heat that satisfactory sense of superiority the members of the police force get from the unofficial but intimate side of their intercourse with the criminal classes, by which the vanity of power is soothed, and the vulgar love of domination over our fellow creatures is flattered as worthily as it deserves.”

— Joseph Conrad

414. “Principles won’t do. Acquisitions, clothes, pretty rags-rags that wouldfly off at the first good shake.”

— Joseph Conrad

415. “You will learn soon how not to be faint-hearted. A man has got to learn everything – and that’s what so many of them youngsters don’t understand.”

— Joseph Conrad

416. “I can’t afford to despise anything. An absurdity may be the starting-point of the most dangerous complications.”

— Joseph Conrad

417. “His mind, cool, alert, watched it sink there with a sort of vague concern at the absurdity of the occupation, till it rested at the bottom, deep down, where our unexpressed longings lie.”

— Joseph Conrad

418. “Anything – anything can be done in this country. That’s what I say; nobody here, you understand, here, can endanger your position. And why? You stand the climate – you outlast them all.”

— Joseph Conrad

419. “The audacity of youth reckons upon what it fancies an unlimited time at its disposal; but a millionaire has unlimited means in his hand – which is better. One’s time on earth is an uncertain quantity, but about the long reach of millions there is no doubt.”

— Joseph Conrad

420. “Night, the inevitable reward of men’s faithful labors on this earth...”

— Joseph Conrad

421. “He inspired uneasiness. That was it! Uneasiness. Not a definite mistrust – just uneasiness – nothing more. You have no idea how effective such a... a... faculty can be.”

— Joseph Conrad

422. “Occupation? Put down, well – tourists. We’ve been called harder names before now;.”

— Joseph Conrad

423. “The girl he had come across, of whom he had possessed himself, to whose presence he was not yet accustomed, with whom he did not yet know how to live; that human being so near and still so strange, gave him a greater sense of his own reality than he had ever known in all his life.”

— Joseph Conrad

424. “When he stepped off the straight and narrow path of his peculiar honesty, it was with an inward assertion of unflinching resolve to fall back again into the monotonous but safe stride of virtue as soon as his little excursion into the wayside quagmires had produced the desired effect.”

— Joseph Conrad

425. “The point was in his being a gifted creature, and that of all his gifts the one that stood out pre-eminently, that carried with it a sense of real presence, was his ability to talk, his words – the gift of expression, the bewildering, the illuminating, the most exalted and the most contemptible, the pulsating stream of light, or the deceitful flow from the heart of an impenetrable darkness. “The.”

— Joseph Conrad

426. “A diplomatic statement... is a statement of which everything is true but the sentiment which seems to prompt it.”

— Joseph Conrad

427. “I found myself back in the sepulchral city resenting the sight of people hurrying through the streets to filch a little money from each other, to devour their infamous cookery, to gulp their unwholesome beer, to dream their insignificant and silly dreams. They trespassed upon my thoughts. They were intruders whose knowledge of life was to me an irritating pretence, because I felt so sure they could not possibly know the things I knew.”

— Joseph Conrad

428. “D’un tratto le tenebre si tramutarono in acqua.”

— Joseph Conrad

429. “And this stillness of life did not the least resemble a peace.”

— Joseph Conrad

430. “O Crassus, tell us, For thou dost know, what is the taste of gold?”

— Joseph Conrad

431. “I suppose at that period I did exist on food in the usual way; but the memory is now that in those days life was sustained on invincible anguish, as a sort of infernal stimulant exciting and consuming at the same time.”

— Joseph Conrad

432. “The solitude of the sea intensifies the thoughts and the facts of one’s experience which seems to lie at the very centre of the world, as the ship which carries one always remains the centre figure of the round horizon.”

— Joseph Conrad

433. “They give you wages as they’d fling a bone to a dog, and they expect you to be grateful. It’s worse than slavery. You don’t expect a slave that’s bought for money to be grateful. And if you sell your work – what is it but selling your own self? You’ve got so many days to live and you sell them one after another. Hey? Who can pay me enough for my life? Ah! But they throw at you your week’s money and expect you to say, “thank you” before you pick it up.”

— Joseph Conrad

434. “I have the means to make myself deadly, but that by itself, you understand, is absolutely nothing in the way of protection. What is effective is the belief those people have in my will to use the means. That’s their impression. It’s absolute. Therefore I am deadly.”

— Joseph Conrad

435. “I remember staying to look at it for a long time, as one would linger within reach of a consoling whisper. The sky was pearly grey. It was one of those overcast days so rare in the tropics, in which memories crowd upon one, memories of other shores, of other faces.”

— Joseph Conrad

436. “The sun was low; and leaning forward side by side, they seemed to be tugging painfully uphill their two ridiculous shadows of unequal length, that trailed behind them slowly over the tall grass without bending a single blade.”

— Joseph Conrad

437. “He cast his eyes upwards and stood amazed. The snow had ceased to fall, and now, as if by a miracle, he saw above his head the clear black sky of the northern winter, decorated with the sumptuous fires of the stars. It was a canopy fit for the resplendent purity of the snows.”

— Joseph Conrad

438. “Lord, lay me down as a stone and raise me up as a loaf!”

— Joseph Conrad

439. “He was easily sorry for people.”

— Joseph Conrad

440. “Anarchists, I suppose, have no families – not, at any rate, as we understand that social relation. Organization into families may answer to a need of human nature, but in the last instance it is based on law, and therefore must be something odious and impossible to an anarchist.”

— Joseph Conrad

441. “Art itself may be defined as a single-minded attempt to render the highest kind of justice to the visible universe, by bringing to light the truth, manifold and one, underlying its every aspect.”

— Joseph Conrad

442. “I’ve seen the devil of violence, and the devil of greed, and the devil of hot desire; but, by all the stars! these were strong, lusty, red-eyed devils, that swayed and drove men – men, I tell you. But as I stood on this hillside, I foresaw that in the blinding sunshine of that land I would become acquainted with a flabby, pretending, weak-eyed devil of a rapacious and pitiless folly. How insidious he could be, too, I was only to find out several months later and a thousand miles farther.”

— Joseph Conrad

443. “It had come into her mind that for life to be large and full, it must contain the care of the past and of the future in every passing moment of the present.”

— Joseph Conrad

444. “It was unreal as everything else – as the philanthropic pretense of the whole concern, as their talk, as their government, as their show of work. The only real feeling was a desire to get appointed to a trading post where ivory was to be had, so that they could earn percentages.”

— Joseph Conrad

445. “It was reckless without hardihood, greedy without audacity, and cruel without courage.”

— Joseph Conrad

446. “Between the five of us there was the strong bond of the sea, and also the fellowship of the craft, which no amount of enthusiasm for yatching, cruising, and so on can give, since one is only the amusement of life and the other is life itself.”

— Joseph Conrad

447. “It was unreal as everything else – as the philanthropic pretense of the whole concern, as their government, as their show of work.”

— Joseph Conrad

448. “There were moments when one’s past came back to one, as it will sometimes when you have not a moment to spare for yourself; but it came in the shape of an unrestful and noisy dream, remembered with wonder amongst the overwhelming realities of this strange world of plants, and water, and silence. And this stillness of life did not in the least resemble a peace. It was the stillness of an implacable force brooding over an inscrutable intention. It looked at you with a vengeful aspect.”

— Joseph Conrad

449. “One gets sometimes such a flash of inspiration, you know. I did say the right thing, though indeed he could not have been more irretrievably lost than he was at this very moment, when the foundations of our intimacy were being laid – to endure – to endure – even to the end – even beyond.”

— Joseph Conrad

450. “In the immutability of their surroundings the foreign shores, the foreign faces, the changing immensity of life, glide past, veiled not by a sense of mystery but by a slightly disdainful ignorance; for there is nothing mysterious to a seaman unless it be the sea itself, which is the mistress of his existence and as inscrutable as Destiny.”

— Joseph Conrad