718 Quotes by Joseph Conrad

There is never any God in a country where men will not help themselves.

Beyond the fence the forest stood up spectrally in the moonlight, and through the dim stir, through the faint sounds of that lamentable courtyard, the silence of the land went home to one’s very heart – its mystery, its greatness, the amazing reality of its concealed life.

He must meet that truth with his own true stuff – with his own inborn strength. 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.

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.

Had he been informed by an indisputable authority that the end of the world was to be finally accomplished by a catastrophic disturbance of the atmosphere, he would have assimilated the information under the simple idea of dirty weather, and no other, because he had no experience of cataclysms, and belief does not necessarily imply comprehension.

When one has got to make correct entries, one comes to hate those savages – hate them to the death.

I saw him open his mouth wide – it gave him a weirdly voracious aspect, as though he had wanted to swallow all the air, all the earth, all the men before him.

We felt meditative, and fit for nothing but placid staring.

Principles won’t do. Acquisitions, clothes, pretty rags-rags that wouldfly off at the first good shake.