Joseph Conrad
Conrad placed on the title page an epigraph taken from Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene: "Sleep after toyle, port after stormie seas, Ease after warre, death after life, does greatly please" This also became Conrad's epitaph.Collection: Taken
The sea never changes and its works, for all the talks of men, are wrapped in mystery.Collection: Nature
Let a fool be made serviceable according to his folly.Collection: Fool
Every age is fed on illusions, lest men should renounce life early and the human race come to an end.Collection: Men
The vilest scramble for loot that ever disfigured the history of human conscience.Collection: Humans
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.Collection: Records
The last thing a woman will consent to in a man whom she loves, or on whom she simply depends, is want of courage.Collection: Life
The Westerly Wind asserting his sway from the south-west quarter is often like a monarch gone mad, driving forth with wild imprecations the most faithful of his courtiers to shipwreck, disaster, and death.Collection: Death
It seems to me I am trying to tell you a dream - making a vain attempt, because no relation of a dream can convey the dream-sensation, that commingling of absurdity, surprise, and bewilderment in a tremor of struggling revolt, that notion of being captured by the incredible which is of the very essence of dreams.Collection: Dream
The word 'ivory' rang in the air, was whispered, was sighed. You would think they were praying to it. A taint of imbecile rapacity blew through it all, like a whiff from some corpse. By Jove! I've never seen anything so unreal in my life. And outside, the silent wilderness surrounding this cleared speck on the earth struck me as something great and invincible, like evil or truth, waiting patiently for the passing away of this fantastic invasion.Collection: Thinking
Mathematics commands all my respect, but I have no use for engines.Collection: Use
When one has got to make correct entries, one comes to hate those savages--hate them to the death.Collection: Hate
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.Collection: Heart
Ah! These commercial interests -- spoiling the finest life under the sun. Why must the sea be used for trade -- and for war as well?...It would have been so much nicer just to sail about, with here and there a port and a bit of land to stretch one's legs on, buy a few books and get a change of cooking for a while.Collection: War
Let them think what they liked, but I didn't mean to drown myself. I meant to swim till I sank -- but that's not the same thing.Collection: Suicidal
For there is nothing mysterious to a seaman unless it be the sea itself, which is the mistress of his existence.Collection: Sea
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 found only in a moral principle.Collection: Law
He hated all this, and somehow he couldn't get away.Collection: Get Away
I have been called romantic. Well, that can't be helped. But stay. I seem to remember that I have been called a realist also. And as that charge too can be made out, let us try to live up to it, at whatever cost, for a change.Collection: Trying
The condemned social order has not been built up on paper and ink, and I don't fancy that a combination of paper and ink will ever put an end to it.Collection: Order
The ocean has the conscienceless temper of a savage autocrat spoiled by much adulationCollection: Ocean
I saw him open his mouth wide. . . as though he had wanted to swallow all the air, all the earth, all the men before him.Collection: Men
Analytical philosophy was very interesting. It always struck me as being very interesting and full of tremendous intellectual curiosities. It is wonderful to see the mind at work in such an intense manner, but, for me, it was still too far removed from my own issues.Collection: Philosophy
All ambitions are lawful except those which climb upward on the miseries or credulities of mankind. All intellectual and artistic ambitions are permissible, up to and even beyond the limit of prudent sanity. They can hurt no one.Collection: Hurt
The artist appeals to that part of our being...which is a gift and not an acquisition - and, therefore, more permanently enduring.Collection: Artist
The vision seemed to enter the house with me-the stretcher, the phantom-bearers, the wild crowd of obedient worshippers, the gloom of the forests, the glitter of the reach between the murky bends, the beat of the drum, regular and muffled like the beating of a heart-the heart of a conquering darkness.Collection: Heart
Books may be written in all sorts of places. Verbal inspiration may enter the berth of a mariner on board a ship frozen fast in a river in the middle of a town.Collection: Book
I found myself back in the sepulchral city resenting the sight of people hurrying through the streets to filch a little money from each other, to devour their infamous cookery, to gulp their unwholesome beer, to dream their insignificant and silly dreams. They trespassed upon my thoughts.Collection: Dream
Being myself animated by feelings of affection toward my fellowmen, I am saddened by the modern system of advertising. Whatever evidence it offers of enterprise, ingenuity, impudence, and resource in certain individuals, it proves to my mind the wide prevalence of that form of mental degradation which is called gullibility.Collection: Sadness
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
La fuerza no es sino una casualidad nacida de la debilidad de los otros.Collection: Strong