718 Quotes by 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.

Man, we know, cannot live by bread alone but hang me if I don’t believe that some women could live by love alone.

He struggled with himself, too. I saw it – I heard it. I saw the inconceivable mystery of a soul that knew no restraint, no faith, and no fear, yet struggling blindly with itself.

I think it had whispered to him things about himself which he did not know, things of which he had no conception till he took counsel with this great solitude – and the whisper had proved irresistibly fascinating. It echoed loudly within him because he was hollow at the core.

Principles? Principles won’t do. Acquisitions, clothes, pretty rags – rags that would fly off at the first good shake. No; you want a deliberate belief.

There is something going on in the sky like a decomposition, like a corruption of the air, which remains as still as ever. After all, mere clouds, which may or may not hold wind or rain. Strange that it should trouble me so. I feel as if all my sins had found me out.

I sit down religiously every morning, I sit down for eight hours every day – and the sitting down is all.

We wander in our thousands over the face of the earth, the illustrious and the obscure, earning beyond the seas our fame, our money, only a crust of bread; but it seems to me that for each of us going home must be like going to render an account.

Watching a coast as it slips by the ship is like thinking about an enigma. There it is before you, smiling, frowning, inviting, grand, mean, insipid, or savage, and always mute with an air of whispering, “Come and find out”.