Joseph Conrad

An artist is a man of action, whether he creates a personality, invents an expedient, or finds the issue of a complicated situation.

History repeats itself, but the special call of an art which has passed away is never reproduced. It is as utterly gone out of the world as the song of a destroyed wild bird.

Efficiency of a practically flawless kind may be reached naturally in the struggle for bread. But there is something beyond — a higher point, a subtle and unmistakable touch of love and pride beyond mere skill; almost an inspiration which …

There is no peace and no rest in the development of material interests. They have their law, and their justice. But it is founded on expediency, and is inhuman; it is without rectitude, without the continuity and the force that can be …

The truth was that he died from solitude, the enemy known but to few on this Earth, and whom only the simplest of us are fit to withstand. The brilliant Costaguanaro of the boulevards had died from solitude and want of faith in himself and …

There is no credulity so eager and blind as the credulity of covetousness, which, in its universal extent, measures the moral misery and the intellectual destitution of mankind.

Having had to encounter single-handed during his period of eclipse many physical dangers, he was well aware of the most dangerous element common to them all: of the crushing, paralyzing sense of human littleness, which is what really …

A nickname may be the best record of a success. That's what I call putting the face of a joke upon the body of a truth.

The air of the New World seems favorable to the art of declamation.

Action is consolatory. It is the enemy of thought and the friend of flattering illusions.

"God for men — religions for women," he muttered sometimes.

Only a moment; a moment of strength, of romance, of glamour — of youth!... A flick of sunshine upon a strange shore, the time to remember, the time for a sigh, and — goodbye! — Night — Goodbye!

I had been six years at sea, but had only seen Melbourne and Sydney, very good places, charming places in their way — but Bankok!

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

For the great mass of mankind the only saving grace that is needed is steady fidelity to what is nearest to hand and heart in the short moment of each human effort.

A man is a worker. If he is not that he is nothing.

In plucking the fruit of memory one runs the risk of spoiling its bloom.

Reality, as usual, beats fiction out of sight.

Woe to the man whose heart has not learned while young to hope, to love — and to put its trust in life!!

He remembered that she was pretty, and, more, that she had a special grace in the intimacy of life. She had the secret of individuality which excites — and escapes.

The last thing a woman will consent to discover in a man whom she loves, or on whom she simply depends, is want of courage.

Every age is fed on illusions, lest men should renounce life early and the human race come to an end.

It is not the clear-sighted who lead the world. Great achievements are accomplished in a blessed, warm mental fog.

The world of finance is a mysterious world in which, incredible as the fact may appear, evaporation precedes liquidation.