Joseph Conrad (1857-1924)

Quotes

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

• The conquest of the earth... is not a pretty thing when you look into it too much. What redeems it is the idea only... not a sentimental pretense but an idea.

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

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

• 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.

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

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

• We live as we dream - alone.

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

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

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

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

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

• All a man can betray is his conscience.

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

• 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.

• The discovery of America was the occasion of the greatest outburst of cruelty and reckless greed known in history.