718 Quotes by Joseph Conrad

He stooped over her, and her raised arms fell upon his shoulders. He lifted her up, steadied himself and began to walk, looking straight before him. “What are you doing?” she asked, feebly. “I am escaping from my enemies,” he said, never once glancing at his light burden. “With me?” she sighed, helplessly. “Never without you,” he said. “You are my strength.

I remember my youth and the feeling that will never come back any more – the feeling that I could last for ever, outlast the sea, the earth, and all men; the deceitful feeling that lures us on to joys, to perils, to love, to vain effort – to death; the triumphant conviction of strength, the heat of life in the handful of dust, the glow in the heart that with every year grows dim, grows cold, grows small, and expires – and expires, too soon, too soon – before life itself.

I am quite willing to be the blind instrument of higher ends. To give one’s life for the cause is nothing. But to have one’s illusions destroyed – that is really almost more than one can bear.

Even extreme grief may ultimately vent itself in violence--but more generally takes the form of apathy.

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.

Curiosity being one of the forms of self-revelation, a systematically incurious person remains always partly mysterious.

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'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.

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.