Joseph Conrad
A man is a worker. If he is not that he is nothing.Collection: Life
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.Collection: Intellectual
Nowhere else than upon the sea do the days, weeks, and months fall away quicker into the past. They seem to be left astern as easily as the light air-bubbles in the swirls of the ship's wake.Collection: Fall
I have a voice, too, and for good or evil mine is the speech that cannot be silencedCollection: Voice
Some of us, regarding the ocean with understanding and affection, have seen it looking old, as if the immemorial ages had been stirred up from the undisturbed bottom of ooze. For it is a gale of wind that makes the sea look old.Collection: Ocean
The atmosphere of officialdom would kill anything that breathes the air of human endeavour, would extinguish hope and fear alike in the supremacy of paper and ink.Collection: Air
For a time I would feel I belonged still to a world of straightforward facts; but the feeling would not last long. Something would turn up to scare it away.Collection: Long
The humblest craft that floats makes its appeal to a seaman by the faithfulness of her life.Collection: Sailing
The interior deprives men of their senses. Here, the eerie stillness of the wilderness and the darkness of night render the men both deaf and blind. Without eyes or ears, they have no frame of reference-and without a frame of reference, they have no clear identities.Collection: Eye
Even extreme grief may ultimately vent itself in violence--but more generally takes the form of apathyCollection: Grief
The revolutionary spirit is mighty convenient in this, that it frees one from all scruples as regards ideas.Collection: Ideas
There is, as every schoolboy knows in this scientific age, a very close chemical relation between coal and diamonds. It is the reason, I believe, why some people allude to coal as "black diamonds." Both these commodities represent wealth; but coal is a much less portable form of property.Collection: Book
For a bag of pepper, they could cut each other's throats without hesitation, and would forswear their souls... The bizarre obstinacy of that desire made them defy death in a thousand shapes; the unknown seas, the loathsome diseases; wounds, captivity, hunger, pestilence and despair. It made them great! By heavens! It made them heroic; and it made them pathetic, too, in their craving for trade with the inflexible death levying its toll on young and oldCollection: Cutting
Sleep after toyle, port after stormie seas, Ease after warre, death after life, does greatly please.Collection: Life
His very existence was improbable, inexplicable, and altogether bewildering. He was an insoluble problem. It was inconceivable how he had existed, how he had succeeded in getting so far, how he had managed to remain -- why he did not instantly disappear.Collection: Problem
In the empty immensity of earth, sky, and water, there she was, incomprehensible, firing into a continent.Collection: Travel
The good author is he who contemplates without marked joy or excessive sorrow the adventures of his soul amongst criticisms.Collection: Adventure
A historian may be an artist too, and a novelist is a historian, the preserver, the keeper, the expounder, of human experience.Collection: Artist
The revolutionary spirit is mighty convenient in this, that it frees one from all scruples as regards ideas. Its hard absolute optimism is repulsive to my mind by the menace of fanaticism and intolerance it contains. No doubt one should smile at these things; but, imperfect Esthete, I am no better Philosopher. All claim to special righteousness awakens in me that scorn and anger from which a philosophical mind should be free.Collection: Philosophical
The end (goal) of art is to figure the hidden meaning of things and not their appearance; for in this profound truth lies their true reality, which does not appear in their external outlines.Collection: Art
There is a subtle and unmistakable touch of love and pride, beyond mere skill, almost an inspiration which gives to all work that finish which is almost art - which is art.Collection: Love
The way of even the most jusitifiable revolution is prepared by personal impulses disguised into creeds.Collection: Way
The world of finance is a mysterious world in which, incredible as the fact may appear, evaporation precedes liquidation.Collection: World
Certain streets have an atmosphere of their own, a sort of universal fame and the particular affection of their citizens. One of such streets is the Cannebiere, and the jest: "If Paris had a Cannebiere, it would be a little Marseilles" is the jocular expression of municipal pride. I, too, I have been under the spell. For me it has been a street leading into the unknown.Collection: Book
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 the truth, and our persistent leanings to error. But most of all they resemble us in their precious hold on life.Collection: Book
You can t, in sound morals, condemn a man for taking care of his own integrity. It is his clear duty. And least of all can you condemn an artist pursuing, however humbly and imperfectly, a creative aim. In that interior world where his thought and his emotions go seeking for the experience of imagined adventures, there are no policemen, no law, no pressure of circumstance or dread of opinion to keep him within bounds. Who then is going to say Nay to his temptations if not his conscience?Collection: Integrity
The terrorist and the policeman both come from the same basket.Collection: Terrorism
I am afraid that if you want to go down into history you'll have to do something for it.Collection: Want
I do not know whether I have been a good seaman, but I know I have been a very faithful one.Collection: Faithful
Droll thing life is -- that mysterious arrangement of merciless logic for a futile purpose. The most you can hope from it is some knowledge of yourself -- that comes too late -- a crop of inextinguishable regrets.Collection: Life
There is a taint of death, a flavour of mortality in lies.Collection: Lying
A writer without interest or sympathy for the foibles of his fellow man is not conceivable as a writer.Collection: Writing
Being a lady is a frightfully troublesome assignment, since it comprises mainly in managing men.Collection: Men
I always went my own road and on my own legs where I had a mind to goCollection: Mind
Necessity, they say, is mother of invention, but fear, too, is not barren of ingenious suggestions.Collection: Mother
Everybody had to be thoroughly understood before being accepted.Collection: Accepted
Egoism , which is the moving force of the world, and altruism , which is its morality , these two contradictory instincts , of which one is so plain and the other so mysterious, cannot serve us unless in the incomprehensible alliance of their irreconcilable antagonism.Collection: Moving
The mind of man is capable of anything--because everything is in it, all the past as well as all the future. What was there after all? Joy, fear, sorrow, devotion, valor, rage--who can tell?--but truth--truth stripped of its cloak of time.Collection: Past
The artist appeals to that part of our being which is not dependent on wisdom; to that in us which is a gift and not an acquisition-and therefore, more permanently enduring. He speaks to our capacity for delight and wonder, to the sense of mystery surrounding our lives; to our sense of pity, and beauty and pain.Collection: Art
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. That — and no more, and it is everything. If I succeed, you shall find there according to your deserts: encouragement, consolation, fear, charm — all you demand; and, perhaps, also that glimpse of truth for which you have forgotten to ask.Collection: Encouragement
Everything can be found at sea according to the spirit of your quest.Collection: Sea
But it is like a running blaze on a plain, like a flash of lightning in the clouds. We live in the flicker - may it last as long as the old earth keeps rolling!Collection: Life
To be a great autocrat you must be a great barbarian.Collection: Power
The true peace of God begins at any spot a thousand miles from the nearest land.Collection: Ocean
Everything belonged to him--but that was a trifle. The thing to know was what he belonged to, how many powers of darkness claimed him for their own.Collection: Darkness
I couldn't have felt more of lonely desolation somehow, had I been robbed of a belief or had missed my destiny in life.Collection: Lonely
I am a great foe of favoritism in public life, in private life, and even in the delicate relationship of an author to his works.Collection: Favoritism
In some inland post feel the savagery, the utter savagery, had closed round him--all that mysterious life of the wilderness that stirs in the forest, in the jungles, in the hearts of wild men. There's no initiation either into such mysteries. He has to live in the midst of the incomprehensible, which is detestable. And it has a fascination, too, which goes to work upon him. The fascination of the abomination--you know. Imagine the growing regrets, the longing to escape, the powerless disgust, the surrender, the hate.Collection: Regret
And suddenly I rejoiced in the great security of the sea as compared with the unrest of the land, in my choice of that untempted life presenting no disquieting problems, invested with an elementary moral beauty by the absolute straightforwardness of its appeal and by the singleness of its purpose.Collection: Sea