718 Quotes by Joseph Conrad

I don’t like work – no man does – but I like what is in the work – the chance to find yourself.

And incompleteness of any sort leads to trouble.

For the dead can live only with the exact intensity and quality of the life imparted to them by the living.

And in this case his great practice in it was assisted by hate, which, like love, has an eloquence of its own.

I can’t afford to despise anything. An absurdity may be the starting-point of the most dangerous complications.

In Russia, the land of spectral ideas and disembodied aspirations, many brave minds have turned away at last from the vain and endless conflict to the one great historical fact of the land. They turned to autocracy for the peace of their patriotic conscience as a weary unbeliever, touched by grace, turns to the faith of his fathers for the blessing of spiritual rest. Like other Russians before him, Razumov, in conflict with himself, felt the touch of grace upon his forehead.

I can’t imagine a human being so hard up for something to do as to quarrel with me.

But the snags were thick, the water was treacherous and shallow, the boiler seemed indeed to have a sulky devil in it, and thus neither that fireman nor I had any time to peer into our creepy thoughts.

The making of a fortune cannot be achieved without some roughness. It is a matter of temperament.