Joseph Conrad
I take it that what all men are really after is some form or perhaps only some formula of peace.
A modern fleet of ships does not so much make use of the sea as exploit a highway.
A man's real life is that accorded to him in the thoughts of other men by reason of respect or natural love.
If you don't make mistakes, you don't make anything .Collection: Mistake
We live as we dream - alone. While the dream disappears, the life continues painfully.Collection: Dream
Follow your bliss. Find where it is and don't be afraid to follow it.Collection: Inspirational
A writing may be lost; a lie may be written; but what the eye has seen is truth and remains in the mind!Collection: Lying
Imagination, not invention, is the supreme master of art as of life.Collection: Art
Art is long and life is short, and success is very far off.Collection: Art
All roads are long which lead to one's heart's desire.Collection: Heart
Any fool can carry on, but a wise man knows how to shorten sail in time.Collection: Inspirational
You must squeeze out of yourself every sensation, every thought, every image, - mercilessly, without reserve and without remorse: you must search the darkest corners of your heart, the most remote recesses of your brain, - you must search them for the image, for the glamour, for the right expression. And you must do it sincerely, at any cost: you must do it so that at the end of your day's work you should feel exhausted, emptied of every sensation and every thought, with a blank mind and an aching heart, with the notion that there is nothing, - nothing left in you.Collection: Heart
Reality, as usual, beats fiction out of sight.Collection: Reality
It is the mark of an inexperienced man not to believe in luck.Collection: Believe
It's only those who do nothing that make no mistakes, I suppose.Collection: Mistake
The discovery of America was the occasion of the greatest outburst of cruelty and reckless greed known in history.Collection: Discovery
There is something haunting in the light of the moon; it has all the dispassionateness of a disembodied soul, and something of its inconceivable mystery.Collection: Halloween
My task, which I am trying to achieve is, by the power of the written word, to make you hear, to make you feel--it is, before all, to make you see.Collection: Writing
I like what is in the work -- the chance to find yourself.Collection: Finding Yourself
Kisses are the remnants of paradise.Collection: Kissing
All a man can betray is his conscience.Collection: Betrayal
Danger lies in the writer becoming the victim of his own exaggeration, losing the exact notion of sincerity, and in the end coming to despise truth itself as something too cold, too blunt for his purpose -- as, in fact, not good enough for his insistent emotion. From laughter and tears the descent is easy to sniveling and giggles.Collection: Laughter
Life knows us not and we do not know life—-we don’t know even our own thoughts. Half the words we use have no meaning whatever and of the other half each man understands each word after the fashion of his own folly and conceit. Faith is a myth and beliefs shift like mists on the shore; thoughts vanish; words, once pronounced, die; and the memory of yesterday is as shadowy as the hope of tomorrowCollection: Fashion
It would take too long to explain the intimate alliance of contradictions in human nature which makes love itself wear at times the desperate shape of betrayal. And perhaps there is no possible explanation.Collection: Betrayal
I have wrestled with death. It is the most unexciting contest you can imagine. It takes place in an impalpable greyness, with nothing underfoot, with nothing around, without spectators, without clamour, without glory, without the great desire of victory, without the great fear of defeat, in a sickly atmostphere of tepid scepticism, without much belief in your own right, and still less in that of your adversary.Collection: Victory
I would not unduly praise the virtue of restraint. It is often merely temperamental. But it is not always a sign of coldness. It may be pride. There can be nothing more humiliating than to see the shaft of one's emotion miss the mark of either laughter or tears. Nothing more humiliating! And this for the reason that should the mark be missed, should the open display of emotion fail to move, then it must perish unavoidably in disgust or contempt.Collection: Laughter
I suppose everybody must be always just a little homesick.Collection: Littles
You can't breathe dead hippo waking, sleeping, and eating, and at the same time keep your precarious grip on existence.Collection: Sleep
Who would care to question the ground of forgiveness or compassion.Collection: Forgiveness
I sit down religiously every morning, I sit down for eight hours every day - and the sitting down is all.Collection: Morning
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 itselfCollection: Love
It echoed loudly within him because he was hollow at the core.Collection: Darkness
What is a novel if not a conviction of our fellow men's existence strong enough to take upon itself a form of imagined life clearer than reality and whose accumulated verisimilitude of selected episodes puts to shame the pride of documentary history.Collection: Strong
It is when we try to grapple with another man's intimate need that we perceive how incomprehensible, wavering and misty are the beings that share with us the sight of the stars and the warmth of the sun. It is as if loneliness were a hard and absolute condition of existence; the envelope of flesh and blood on which our eyes are fixed melts before the outstretched hand, and there remains only the capricious, unconsolable and elusive spirit that no eye can follow, no hand can grasp.Collection: Stars
The conquest of the earth... is not a pretty thing when you look into it too much. What redeems it is the idea only... not a sentimental pretence but an idea.Collection: Ideas
... it was written I should be loyal to the nightmare of my choice.Collection: Struggle
The moon had spread over everything a thin layer of silver - over the rank grass, over the mud, upon the wall of matted vegetation standing higher than the wall of a temple, over the great river I could see through a sombre gap glittering, glittering, as it flowed broadly by without a murmur. All this was great, expectant, mute, while the man jabbered about himself.Collection: Wall
My task is to make you hear, feel and see. That and no more, and that is everything.Collection: Tasks
He has to live in the midst of the incomprehensible, which is also detestable.Collection: Darkness
One can't live with one's finger everlastingly on one's pulse.Collection: Pulse
Yet, when one thinks of it, diplomacy without force is a but a rotten reed to lean upon.Collection: Thinking
The artist in his calling of interpreter creates because he must. He is so much of a voice that, for him, silence is like deathCollection: Artist
Words, as is well known, are the great foes of reality. I have been for many years a teacher of languages. It is an occupation which at length becomes fatal to whatever share of imagination, observation, and insight an ordinary person may be heir to. To a teacher of languages there comes a time when the world is but a place of many words and man appears a mere talking animal not much more wonderful than a parrot.Collection: Teacher
All creative art is magic , is evocation of the unseen in forms persuasive, enlightening, familiar and surprising, for the edification of mankind , pinned down by the conditions of its existence to the earnest consideration of the most insignificant tides of reality .Collection: Art
Do not talk to me of Archimedes' lever. He was an absent-minded person with a mathematical imagination. Mathematics commands my respect, but I have no use for engines. Give me the right word and the right accent and I will move the world.Collection: Moving
Youth is insolent; it is its right - its necessity; it has got to assert itself, and all assertion in this world of doubts is a defiance, is an insolence.Collection: Doubt
The reaches opened before us and closed behind, as if the forest had stepped leisurely across the water to bar the way for our return. We penetrated deeper and deeper into the heart of darkness.Collection: Heart
I remember my youth and the feeling that will never come back any moreCollection: Feelings