Top 500 Joseph Conrad Quotes (2024 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 revolutionary spirit is mighty convenient in this, that it frees one from all scruples as regards ideas. Its hard absolute optimism is repulsive to my mind by the menace of fanaticism and intolerance it contains.”

— Joseph Conrad

403. “The promises, the terrors, the hopes of eternity, are the concern of the corrupt dead; but the obvious sweetness of life belongs to living, healthy men.”

— Joseph Conrad

404. “There must be a wonderful soothing power in mere words since so many men have used them for self-communion. Being.”

— Joseph Conrad

405. “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

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

— Joseph Conrad

407. “I suppose I have done a certain amount of harm, since I allowed myself to be tempted into action. It seemed innocent enough, but all action is bound to be harmful. It is devilish. That is why this world is evil upon the whole. But I have done with it! I shall never lift a little finger again. At one time I thought that intelligent observation of facts was the best way of cheating the time which is allotted to us whether we want it or not; but now I, have done with observation, too.”

— Joseph Conrad

408. “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

409. “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

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

— Joseph Conrad

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

— Joseph Conrad

412. “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

413. “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

414. “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

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

— Joseph Conrad

416. “But both the diabolic love and the unearthly hate of the mysteries it had penetrated fought for the possession of that soul satiated with primitive emotions, avid of lying fame, of sham distinction, of all the appearances of success and power.”

— Joseph Conrad

417. “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

418. “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

419. “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

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

— Joseph Conrad

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

— Joseph Conrad

422. “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

423. “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

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

— Joseph Conrad

425. “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

426. “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

427. “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

428. “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

429. “He was easily sorry for people.”

— Joseph Conrad

430. “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

431. “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

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

— Joseph Conrad

433. “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

434. “I saw the devil of violence, and the devil of greed, and the devil of hot lust...”

— Joseph Conrad

435. “I observed with assumed innocence that no man was safe from trouble in this world.”

— Joseph Conrad

436. “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

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

— Joseph Conrad

438. “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

439. “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

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

— Joseph Conrad

441. “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

442. “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

443. “It was the stillness of an implacable force brooding over an inscrutable intention.”

— Joseph Conrad

444. “No, it’s impossible. It’s impossible to tell anyone what it feels like to be you. It’s impossible. We live the same way that we dream – alone.”

— Joseph Conrad

445. “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

446. “It made you feel very small, very lost, and yet it was not altogether depressing, that feeling. After all, if you were small, the grimy beetle crawled on – which was just what you wanted it to do. Where the pilgrims imagined it crawled to I don’t know. To some place where they expected to get something, I bet! For me it crawled toward Kurtz – exclusively; but when the steam-pipes started leaking we crawled very slow.”

— Joseph Conrad

447. “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

448. “I went a little farther, then still a little farther – till I had gone so far that I don’t know how I’ll ever get back.”

— Joseph Conrad

449. “To tear treasure out of the bowels of the land was their desire, with no more moral purpose at the back of it than there is in burglars breaking into a safe.”

— Joseph Conrad

450. “This was the foreman – a boiler-maker by trade – a good worker. He was a lank, bony, yellow-faced man, with big intense eyes. His aspect was worried, and his head was as bald as the palm of my hand; but his hair in falling seemed to have stuck to his chin, and had prospered in the new locality, for his beard hung down to his waist.”

— Joseph Conrad