110+ Joseph Conrad Quotes On Writing, Death And Sea

Joseph Conrad was a Polish-born British novelist who wrote in English. He is best known for his novels Heart of Darkness and Lord Jim, which explore the human psyche and the nature of imperialism. He is considered an early modernist, as his works often feature a psychological perspective and moral ambiguity. Following is our collection on famous quotes by Joseph Conrad on writing, death, sea.

Top 10 Joseph Conrad Quotes

1. It is not the clear-sighted who rule the world. Great achievements are accomplished in a blessed, warm fog.
2. I don't like work... but I like what is in work - the chance to find yourself. Your own reality - for yourself, not for others - which no other man can ever know.
3. Being a woman is a terribly difficult task, since it consists principally in dealing with men.
4. The belief in a supernatural source of evil is not necessary; men alone are quite capable of every wickedness.
5. You shall judge a man by his foes as well as by his friends.
6. We penetrated deeper and deeper into the heart of darkness
7. There is nothing more enticing, disenchanting, and enslaving than the life at sea.
8. They talk of a man betraying his country, his friends, his sweetheart. There must be a moral bond first. All a man can betray is his conscience.
9. To a teacher of languages there comes a time when the world is but a place of many words and man appears a mere talking animal not much more wonderful than a parrot.
10. I do not know whether I have been a good seaman, but I know I have been a very faithful one.

Joseph Conrad Short Quotes

• All a man can betray is his conscience.
• Facing it, always facing it, that's the way to get through. Face it.
• Gossip is what no one claims to like, but everybody enjoys.
• There is something haunting in the light of the moon.
• I suppose everybody must be always just a little homesick.
• It is the mark of an inexperienced man not to believe in luck.
• All ambitions are lawful except those which climb upward on the miseries or credulities of mankind.
• Protection is the first necessity of opulence and luxury.
• Vanity plays lurid tricks with our memory.
• As a general rule, a reputation is built on manner as much as on achievement.

Joseph Conrad Quotes About Writing

Imagination, not invention, is the supreme master of art as of life. — Joseph Conrad

A writer without interest or sympathy for the foibles of his fellow man is not conceivable as a writer. — Joseph Conrad

Writing in English is like throwing mud at a wall. — Joseph Conrad

A writing may be lost; a lie may be written; but what the eye has seen is truth and remains in the mind! — Joseph Conrad

What is a novel if not a conviction of our fellow-men's existence strong enough to take upon itself a form of imagined life clearer than reality and whose accumulated verisimilitude of selected episodes puts to shame the pride of documentary history? — Joseph Conrad

Art is long and life is short, and success is very far off. — Joseph Conrad

Joseph Conrad Quotes About Death

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. — Joseph Conrad

I have wrestled with death. It is the most unexciting contest you can imagine. — Joseph Conrad

The Westerly Wind asserting his sway from the south-west quarter is often like a monarch gone mad, driving forth with wild imprecations the most faithful of his courtiers to shipwreck, disaster, and death. — Joseph Conrad

That's why love is so inseparable from any talk about truth and death, because we know that love is fundamentally a death of an old self that was isolated and the emergence of a new self now entangled with another self, the self that you fall in love with. — Joseph Conrad

There is a taint of death, a flavour of mortality in lies. — Joseph Conrad

Sleep after toyle, port after stormie seas, Ease after warre, death after life, does greatly please. — Joseph Conrad

When one has got to make correct entries, one comes to hate those savages--hate them to the death. — Joseph Conrad

Conrad placed on the title page an epigraph taken from Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene: "Sleep after toyle, port after stormie seas, Ease after warre, death after life, does greatly please" This also became Conrad's epitaph. — Joseph Conrad

The artist in his calling of interpreter creates because he must. He is so much of a voice that, for him, silence is like death — Joseph Conrad

Joseph Conrad Quotes About Sea

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

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

The sea has never been friendly to man. At most it has been the accomplice of human restlessness. — Joseph Conrad

Any fool can carry on, but a wise man knows how to shorten sail in time. — Joseph Conrad

For there is nothing mysterious to a seaman unless it be the sea itself, which is the mistress of his existence. — Joseph Conrad

For all that has been said of the love that certain natures (on shore) have professed for it, for all the celebrations it has been the object of in prose and song, the sea has never been friendly to man. At most it has been the accomplice of human restlessness. — Joseph Conrad

The true peace of God begins at any spot a thousand miles from the nearest land. — Joseph Conrad

A man that is born falls into a dream like a man who falls into the sea. If he tries to climb out into the air as inexperienced people endeavor to do, he drowns. — Joseph Conrad

And suddenly I rejoiced in the great security of the sea as compared with the unrest of the land, in my choice of that untempted life presenting no disquieting problems, invested with an elementary moral beauty by the absolute straightforwardness of its appeal and by the singleness of its purpose. — Joseph Conrad

Nowhere else than upon the sea do the days, weeks, and months fall away quicker into the past. They seem to be left astern as easily as the light air-bubbles in the swirls of the ship's wake. — Joseph Conrad

Joseph Conrad Quotes About Darkness

The offing was barred by a black bank of clouds, and the tranquil water-way leading to the uttermost ends of the earth flowed somber under an overcast sky--seemed to lead into the heart of an immense darkness. — Joseph Conrad

The reaches opened before us and closed behind, as if the forest had stepped leisurely across the water to bar the way for our return. We penetrated deeper and deeper into the heart of darkness. — Joseph Conrad

They were conquerors, and for that you want only brute force--nothing to boast of, when you have it, since your strength is just an accident arising from the weakness of others. — Joseph Conrad

He has to live in the midst of the incomprehensible, which is also detestable. — Joseph Conrad

The mind of man is capable of anything. — Joseph Conrad

Everything belonged to him--but that was a trifle. The thing to know was what he belonged to, how many powers of darkness claimed him for their own. — Joseph Conrad

... it was written I should be loyal to the nightmare of my choice. — Joseph Conrad

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 pretence but an idea. — Joseph Conrad

No, it is impossible; it is impossible to convey the life-sensation of any given epoch of one’s existence--that which makes its truth, its meaning--its subtle and penetrating essence. It is impossible. We live, as we dream--alone. — Joseph Conrad

We live in the flicker -- may it last as long as the old earth keeps rolling! But darkness was here yesterday. — Joseph Conrad

Joseph Conrad Quotes About Life

But it is like a running blaze on a plain, like a flash of lightning in the clouds. We live in the flicker - may it last as long as the old earth keeps rolling! — Joseph Conrad

Perhaps life is just that... a dream and a fear. — Joseph Conrad

Every age is fed on illusions, lest men should renounce life early and the human race come to an end. — Joseph Conrad

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

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. — Joseph Conrad

Only in men's imagination does every truth find an effective and undeniable existence. Imagination, not invention, is the supreme master of art as of life. — Joseph Conrad

The humblest craft that floats makes its appeal to a seaman by the faithfulness of her life. — Joseph Conrad

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

Few men realize that their life, the very essence of their character, their capabilities and their audacities, are only the expression of their belief in the safety of their surroundings. — Joseph Conrad

We owe much to the fruitful meditation of our sages, but a sane view of life is, after all, elaborated mainly in the kitchen. — Joseph Conrad

Joseph Conrad Quotes About Truth

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

Vanity plays lurid tricks with our memory, and the truth of every passion wants some pretence to make it live. — Joseph Conrad

The end (goal) of art is to figure the hidden meaning of things and not their appearance; for in this profound truth lies their true reality, which does not appear in their external outlines. — Joseph Conrad

One must explore deep and believe the incredible to find the new particles of truth floating in an ocean of insignificance. — Joseph Conrad

A caricature is putting the face of a joke on the body of a truth. — Joseph Conrad

I can't tell if a straw ever saved a drowning man, but I know that a mere glance is enough to make dspair pause. For in truth, we who are creatures of impulse, are creatures of despair. — Joseph Conrad

The mind of man is capable of anything--because everything is in it, all the past as well as all the future. What was there after all? Joy, fear, sorrow, devotion, valor, rage--who can tell?--but truth--truth stripped of its cloak of time. — Joseph Conrad

For a moment I had a view of a world that seemed to wear a vast and dismal aspect of disorder, while, in truth, thanks to our unwearied efforts, it is as sunny an arrangement of small conveniences as the mind of man can conceive. — Joseph Conrad

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

And perhaps in this is the whole difference; perhaps all the wisdom, and all truth, and all sincerity, are just compressed into that inappreciable moment of time in which we step over the threshold of the invisible. — Joseph Conrad

Joseph Conrad Quotes About Earth

The conquest of the earth, which mostly means the taking it away from those who have a different complexion or slightly flatter noses than ourselves, is not a pretty thing when you look into it too much. — Joseph Conrad

It is to be remarked that a good many people are born curiously unfitted for the fate waiting them on this earth. — Joseph Conrad

In the empty immensity of earth, sky, and water, there she was, incomprehensible, firing into a continent. — Joseph Conrad

And this also," said Marlow suddenly, "has been one of the dark places of the earth. — Joseph Conrad

The old river in its broad reach rested unruffled at the decline of day, after ages of good service done to the race that peopled its banks, spread out in the tranquil dignity of a waterway leading to the uttermost ends of the earth. — Joseph Conrad

I remember my youth... the feeling that I could last forever, outlast the sea, the earth, and all men. — Joseph Conrad

The conquest of the earth, which mostly means the taking it away from those who have a different complexion or slightly flatter noses than ourselves, is not a pretty thing when you look into it. — Joseph Conrad

That faculty of beholding at a hint the face of his desire and the shape of his dream, without which the earth would know no lover and no adventurer. — Joseph Conrad

I saw him open his mouth wide. . . as though he had wanted to swallow all the air, all the earth, all the men before him. — Joseph Conrad

It is very difficult to be wholly joyous or wholly sad on this earth. The comic, when it is human, soon takes upon itself a face of pain; and some of our grieves... have their source in weaknesses which must be recognized with smiling compassion as the common inheritance of us all. — Joseph Conrad

Joseph Conrad Quotes About Words

Words, as is well known, are the great foes of reality. — Joseph Conrad

My task, which I am trying to achieve is, by the power of the written word, to make you hear, to make you feel--it is, before all, to make you see. — Joseph Conrad

Who knows what true loneliness is - not the conventional word but the naked terror? To the lonely themselves it wears a mask. The most miserable outcast hugs some memory or some illusion. — Joseph Conrad

He who wants to persuade should put his trust not in the right argument, but in the right word. The power of sound has always been greater than the power of sense. — Joseph Conrad

Give me the right word and the right accent and I will move the world. — Joseph Conrad

Do not talk to me of Archimedes' lever. He was an absent-minded person with a mathematical imagination. Mathematics commands my respect, but I have no use for engines. Give me the right word and the right accent and I will move the world. — Joseph Conrad

There is a weird power in a spoken word. . . . And a word carries far--very far--deals destruction through time as the bullets go flying through space. — Joseph Conrad

There is never enough time to say our last word-the last word of our love, of our desire, faith, remorse, submission, revolt. — Joseph Conrad

You perceive the force of a word. He who wants to persuade should put his trust not in the right argument, but in the right word. The power of sound has always been greater than the power of sense. I don — Joseph Conrad

They had behind them, to my mind, the terrific suggestiveness of words heard in dreams, of phrases spoken in nightmares. — Joseph Conrad

Joseph Conrad Famous Quotes And Sayings

All creative art is magic, is evocation of the unseen in forms persuasive, enlightening, familiar and surprising. — Joseph Conrad

There is something haunting in the light of the moon; it has all the dispassionateness of a disembodied soul, and something of its inconceivable mystery. — Joseph Conrad

In order to move others deeply we must deliberately allow ourselves to be carried away beyond the bounds of our normal sensibility. — Joseph Conrad

You can't, in sound morals, condemn a man for taking care of his own integrity. It is his clear duty. — Joseph Conrad

A belief in a supernatural source of evil is not necessary; men alone are quite capable of every wickedness. — Joseph Conrad

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

The revolutionary spirit is mighty convenient in this, that it frees one from all scruples as regards ideas. — Joseph Conrad

History repeats itself, but the special call of an art which has passed away is never reproduced. It is as utterly gone out of the world as the song of a destroyed wild bird. — Joseph Conrad

Kisses are the remnants of paradise. — Joseph Conrad

Everybody had to be thoroughly understood before being accepted. — Joseph Conrad

The scrupulous and the just, the noble, humane, and devoted natures; the unselfish and the intelligent may begin a movement - but it passes away from them. They are not the leaders of a revolution. They are its victims. — Joseph Conrad

The atmosphere of officialdom would kill anything that breathes the air of human endeavour, would extinguish hope and fear alike in the supremacy of paper and ink. — Joseph Conrad

The scrupulous and the just, the noble, humane, and devoted natures; the unselfish and the intelligent may begin a movement -- but it passes away from them. They are not the leaders of a revolution. They are its victims. — Joseph Conrad

Being myself animated by feelings of affection toward my fellowmen, I am saddened by the modern system of advertising. Whatever evidence it offers of enterprise, ingenuity, impudence, and resource in certain individuals, it proves to my mind the wide prevalence of that form of mental degradation which is called gullibility. — Joseph Conrad

A noble man compares and estimates himself by an idea which is higher than himself; and a mean man, by one lower than himself. The one produces aspiration; the other ambition, which is the way in which a vulgar man aspires. — Joseph Conrad

It is my belief no man ever understands quite his own artful dodges to escape from the grim shadow of self knowledge. — Joseph Conrad

A man is a worker. If he is not that he is nothing. — Joseph Conrad

A man's most open actions have a secret side to them. — Joseph Conrad

It is respectable to have no illusions, and safe, and profitable and dull. — Joseph Conrad

To have his path made clear for him is the aspiration of every human being in our beclouded and tempestuous existence. — Joseph Conrad

Hang ideas! They are tramps, vagabonds, knocking at the back-door of your mind, each taking a little of your substance, each carrying away some crumb of that belief in a few simple notions you must cling to if you want to live decently and would like to die easy! — Joseph Conrad

I let him run on, this papier-maché Mephistopheles, and it seemed to me that if I tried I could poke my forefinger through him, and would find nothing inside but a little loose dirt, maybe. — Joseph Conrad

As to honor -- you know -- it's a very fine mediaeval inheritance which women never got hold of. It wasn't theirs. — Joseph Conrad

Danger lies in the writer becoming the victim of his own exaggeration, losing the exact notion of sincerity, and in the end coming to despise truth itself as something too cold, too blunt for his purpose -- as, in fact, not good enough for his insistent emotion. From laughter and tears the descent is easy to sniveling and giggles. — Joseph Conrad

The hair of his face, on the contrary, carroty and flaming, resembled a growth of copper wire clipped short to the line of the lip; while, no matter how close he shaved, fiery metallic gleams passed, when he moved his head, over the surface of his cheeks. — Joseph Conrad

Lights of ships moved in the fairway-a great stir of lights going up and going down. And farther west on the upper reaches the place of the monstrous town was still marked ominously on the sky, a brooding gloom in sunshine, a lurid glare under the stars. — Joseph Conrad

Follow your bliss. Find where it is and don't be afraid to follow it. — Joseph Conrad

Any work that aspires, however humbly, to the condition of art should carry its justification in every line. — Joseph Conrad

The last thing a woman will consent to discover in a man whom she loves, or on whom she simply depends, is want of courage. — Joseph Conrad

The sky over Patusan was blood-red, immense, streaming like an open vein. An enormous sun nestled crimson amongst the treetops, and the forest below had a black and forbidding face. — Joseph Conrad

The real significance of crime is in its being a breach of faith with the community of mankind. — Joseph Conrad

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

This magnificent butterfly finds a little heap of dirt and sits still on it; but man will never on his heap of mud keep still. — Joseph Conrad

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

It is when we try to grapple with another man's intimate need that we perceive how incomprehensible, wavering, and misty are the beings that share with us the sight of the stars and the warmth of the sun. — Joseph Conrad

Resignation, not mystic, not detached, but resignation open-eyed, conscious, and informed by love, is the only one of our feelings for which it is impossible to become a sham. — Joseph Conrad

What all men are really after is some form, or perhaps only some formula, of peace. — Joseph Conrad

The good author is he who contemplates without marked joy or excessive sorrow the adventures of his soul amongst criticisms. — Joseph Conrad

There is no peace and no rest in the development of material interests. They have their law, and their justice. But it is founded on expediency, and is inhuman; it is without rectitude, without the continuity and the force that can be found only in a moral principle. — Joseph Conrad

Mathematics commands all my respect, but I have no use for engines. — Joseph Conrad

Criticism, that fine flower of personal expression in the garden of letters. — Joseph Conrad

An artist is a man of action, whether he creates a personality, invents an expedient, or finds the issue of a complicated situation. — Joseph Conrad

Life Lessons by Joseph Conrad

1. Joseph Conrad taught that life is a journey of self-discovery, and that it is important to stay true to oneself in order to find true happiness.
2. He also believed that life is unpredictable, and that it is important to be open to new experiences and to take risks in order to grow and learn.
3. Finally, he taught that life is full of both beauty and tragedy, and that it is important to appreciate the good moments and learn from the bad ones.