Joseph Conrad Quotes

It`s extraordinary how we go through life with eyes half shut, with dull ears, with dormant thoughts. Perhaps it`s just as well; and it may be that it is this very dullness that makes life to the incalculable majority so supportable and so welcome.

Having had to encounter single-handed during his period of eclipse many physical dangers, he was well aware of the most dangerous element common to them all: of the crushing, paralysing sense of human littleness, which is what really defeats a human struggling with natural forces, alone, far from the eyes of his fellows.

I take it that what all men are really after is some form or perhaps only some formula of peace.

Facing it, always facing it, that`s the way to get through. Face it.

Who could tell what forms, what visions, what faces, what forgiveness he could see in the glow of the west!

I can`t tell if a straw ever saved a drowning man, but I know that a mere glance is enough to make despair pause. For in truth we who are creatures of impulse are creatures of despair.

Being a woman is a terribly difficult task since it consists principally in dealing with men.

Strength is just an accident arising from the weakness of others.

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

But the truth was that he died from solitude, the enemy known but to few on this Earth, and whom only the simplest of us are fit to withstand. The brilliant Costaguanaro of the boulevards had died from solitude and want of faith in himself and others.

All ambitions are lawful except those that climb upward on the miseries or credulities of mankind.

The belief in a supernatural source of evil is not necessary; men alone are quite capable of every wickedness.

We live as we dream - alone.

All a man can betray is his conscience.

For the great mass of mankind, the only saving grace needed is a steady fidelity to what is nearest to hand and heart for the short moment of each human effort.

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

Being a woman is a terribly difficult task, since it consists principally in dealing with men.

What makes mankind tragic is not that they are the victims of nature, it is that they are conscious of it.

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.

Woe to the man whose heart has not learned while young to hope, to love - and to put its trust in life.