A man that is born falls into a dream like a man who falls into the sea. If he tries to climb out into the air as inexperienced people endeavor to do, he drowns.
- Joseph Conrad Quote

A man's most open actions have a secret side to them.
- Joseph Conrad Quote

A man's real life is that accorded to him in the thoughts of other men by reason of respect or natural love.
- Joseph Conrad Quote

A modern fleet of ships does not so much make use of the sea as exploit a highway.
- Joseph Conrad Quote

Action is consolatory. It is the enemy of thought and the friend of flattering illusions.
- Joseph Conrad Quote

All ambitions are lawful except those which climb upward on the miseries or credulities of mankind.
- Joseph Conrad Quote

Any work that aspires, however humbly, to the condition of art should carry its justification in every line.
- Joseph Conrad Quote

As in political so in literary action a man wins friends for himself mostly by the passion of his prejudices and the consistent narrowness of his outlook.
- Joseph Conrad Quote

As to honor - you know - it's a very fine mediaeval inheritance which women never got hold of. It wasn't theirs.
- Joseph Conrad Quote

Being a woman is a terribly difficult task, since it consists principally in dealing with men.
- Joseph Conrad Quote

Don't you forget what's divine in the Russian soul and that's resignation.
- Joseph Conrad Quote

Facing it, always facing it, that's the way to get through. Face it.
- Joseph Conrad Quote

For all that has been said of the love that certain natures (on shore) have professed for it, for all the celebrations it has been the object of in prose and song, the sea has never been friendly to man. At most it has been the accomplice of human restlessness.
- Joseph Conrad Quote

Going home must be like going to render an account.
- Joseph Conrad Quote

Gossip is what no one claims to like, but everybody enjoys.
- Joseph Conrad Quote

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.
- Joseph Conrad Quote

I don't like work... but I like what is in work - the chance to find yourself. Your own reality - for yourself, not for others - which no other man can ever know.
- Joseph Conrad Quote

I take it that what all men are really after is some form or perhaps only some formula of peace.
- Joseph Conrad Quote

In order to move others deeply we must deliberately allow ourselves to be carried away beyond the bounds of our normal sensibility.
- Joseph Conrad Quote

It is not the clear-sighted who rule the world. Great achievements are accomplished in a blessed, warm fog.
- Joseph Conrad Quote

Nations it may be have fashioned their Governments, but the Governments have paid them back in the same coin.
- Joseph Conrad Quote

Only in men's imagination does every truth find an effective and undeniable existence. Imagination, not invention, is the supreme master of art as of life.
- Joseph Conrad Quote

Resignation, not mystic, not detached, but resignation open-eyed, conscious, and informed by love, is the only one of our feelings for which it is impossible to become a sham.
- Joseph Conrad Quote

Some great men owe most of their greatness to the ability of detecting in those they destine for their tools the exact quality of strength that matters for their work.
- Joseph Conrad Quote

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.
- Joseph Conrad Quote

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 Quote

The sea - this truth must be confessed - has no generosity. No display of manly qualities - courage, hardihood, endurance, faithfulness - has ever been known to touch its irresponsible consciousness of power.
- Joseph Conrad Quote

There are men here and there to whom the whole of life is like an after-dinner hour with a cigar; easy, pleasant, empty, perhaps enlivened by some fable of strife to be forgotten - before the end is told - even if there happens to be any end to it.
- Joseph Conrad Quote

There is nothing more enticing, disenchanting, and enslaving than the life at sea.
- Joseph Conrad Quote
This magnificent butterfly finds a little heap of dirt and sits still on it; but man will never on his heap of mud keep still.
- Joseph Conrad Quote

To have his path made clear for him is the aspiration of every human being in our beclouded and tempestuous existence.
- Joseph Conrad Quote

Truth of a modest sort I can promise you, and also sincerity. That complete, praiseworthy sincerity which, while it delivers one into the hands of one's enemies, is as likely as not to embroil one with one's friends.
- Joseph Conrad Quote

Words, as is well known, are the great foes of reality.
- Joseph Conrad Quote

You can't, in sound morals, condemn a man for taking care of his own integrity. It is his clear duty.
- Joseph Conrad Quote

You shall judge of a man by his foes as well as by his friends.
- Joseph Conrad Quote