Joseph Conrad Quotes

• Any fool can carry on, but only the wise man knows how to shorten sail.

  Joseph Conrad

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

  Joseph Conrad

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• It was amazing to think that in those miles of human habitations there was not probably half a dozen pounds of nails.

  Joseph Conrad

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• Thinking is the great enemy of perfection. The habit of profound reflection, I am compelled to say, is the most pernicious of all the habits formed by civilized man.

  Joseph Conrad

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• On the contrary, the mere fact of dealing with matters outside the general run of everyday experience laid me under the obligation of a more scrupulous fidelity to the truth of my own sensations. The problem was to make unfamiliar things credible.

  Joseph Conrad

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• The scrupulous and the just, the noble, humane, and devoted natures; the unselfish and the intelligent may begin a movement—but it passes away from them. They are not the leaders of a revolution. They are its victims.

  Joseph Conrad

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• Some kind of moral discovery should be the object of every tale.

  Joseph Conrad

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• The terrorist and the policeman both come from the same basket.

  Joseph Conrad

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• Of all the inanimate objects, of all men’s creations, books are the nearest to us, for they contain our very thoughts, our ambitions, our indignations, our illusions, our fidelity to truth, and our persistent leaning towards error. But most of all they resemble us in their precarious hold on life.

  Joseph Conrad

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• To be hopeful in an artistic sense it is not necessary to think that the world is good. It is enough to believe that there is no impossibility of it being made so.

  Joseph Conrad

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• Liberty of the imagination should be the most precious possession of a novelist.

  Joseph Conrad

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• I remember my youth and the feeling that it 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.

  Joseph Conrad

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• The mysterious East, perfumed like a flower, silent like death, dark like a grave.

  Joseph Conrad

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• Suddenly a puff of wind, a puff faint and tepid and laden with strange odours of blossoms, of aromatic wood, comes out of the still night—the first sigh of the east on my face.

  Joseph Conrad

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• A man that is born falls into a dream like a man who falls into the sea… The way is to the destructive element submit yourself, and with the exertions of your hands and feet in the water make the deep, deep sea keep you up.

  Joseph Conrad

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• Mistah Kurtz—he dead.

  Joseph Conrad

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• He cried in a whisper at some image, at some vision—he cried out twice, a cry that was no more than a breath: ‘The horror! The horror!’

  Joseph Conrad

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• Exterminate all the brutes!

  Joseph Conrad

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• We live, as we dream—alone.

  Joseph Conrad

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• The conquest of the earth, which mostly means the taking it away from those who have a different complexion or slightly flatter noses than ourselves, is not a pretty thing when you look into it too much. What redeems it is an idea only.

  Joseph Conrad

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Joseph Conrad (82)

Birth:	3rd December, 1857
Death:	3rd August, 1924
Nationality:	Polish
Profession:	Novelist, Writer

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