718 Quotes by Joseph Conrad

A historian may be an artist too, and a novelist is a historian, the preserver, the keeper, the expounder, of human experience.

All ambitions are lawful except those which climb upward upon the miseries and credulities of mankind

You shall judge of a man by his foes as well as by his friends.

To be a great autocrat you must be a great barbarian.

There is, as every schoolboy knows in this scientific age, a very close chemical relation between coal and diamonds. It is the reason, I believe, why some people allude to coal as "black diamonds." Both these commodities represent wealth; but coal is a much less portable form of property.

This could have occurred nowhere but in England, where men and sea interpenetrate, so to speak.

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

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.

The ethical view of the universe involves us in so many cruel and absurd contradictions that I have come to suspect that the aim of creation cannot be ethical at all.