02UndatedThe 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?--buttruth--truth stripped of its cloak of time.Joseph Conrad / quote ↗
03UndatedBut when one is young one must see things, gather experience, ideas; enlarge the mind.Joseph Conrad / quote ↗
04UndatedThe mind of man is capable of anything - because everything is in it, all the past as well as the future.Joseph Conrad / quote ↗
05UndatedThey were conquerors, and for that you want only brute force--nothing to boast of, when you have it, since your strength is just an accident arising from the weakness of others.Joseph Conrad / quote ↗
06UndatedIt is a fact that the bitterest contradictions and the deadliest conflicts of the world are carried on in every individual breast capable of feeling and passion. [An anarchist]Joseph Conrad / quote ↗
07UndatedThe man up there raged aloud in two languages, and with a sincerity in his fury that almost convinced me I had, in some way, sinned against the harmony of the universeJoseph Conrad / quote ↗
08UndatedI let him run on, this papier-maché Mephistopheles, and it seemed to me that if I tried I could poke my forefinger through him, and would find nothing inside but a little loose dirt, maybe.Joseph Conrad / quote ↗
09UndatedHe was there below me, and, upon my word, to look at him was as edifying as seeing a dog in a parody of breeches and a featherhat, walking on his hind legs.Joseph Conrad / quote ↗
10UndatedThere is a taint of death, a flavour of mortality in lies - which is exactly what I hate and detest in the world - what I want to forget.Joseph Conrad / quote ↗
11UndatedFiction, at the point of development at which it has arrived, demands from the writer a spirit of scrupulous abnegation.The only legitimate of all the irreconcilable antagonisms that make our life so enigmatic, so burdensome, so fascinating, so dangerous--so full of hope. They exist! And this is the only fundamental truth of fiction.Joseph Conrad / quote ↗
12UndatedOver the lives borne from under the shadow of death there seems to fall the shadow of madness.Joseph Conrad / quote ↗
13UndatedIt was not my strength that wanted nursing, it was my imagination that wanted soothing.Joseph Conrad / quote ↗
14UndatedI saw only the reality of his destiny, which he had knownhow to follow with unfaltering footsteps, that life begun in humblesurroundings, rich in generous enthusiasms, in friendship, love, war--inall the exalted elements of romance.Joseph Conrad / quote ↗
15UndatedAll this happened in much less time than it takes to tell, since I am trying to interpret for you into slow speech the instantaneous effect of visual impressions.Joseph Conrad / quote ↗
16Undated...his words - the gift of expression, the bewildering, the iluminating, the most exalted and the most contemptible, the pulsating stream of light or the deceitful flow from the heart of an impenetrable darkness.Joseph Conrad / quote ↗
18UndatedEven extreme grief may ultimately ventitself in violence--but more generally takes the form of apathyJoseph Conrad / quote ↗
19UndatedHe did not care what the end would be, and in his lucid moments overvalued his indifference. The danger, when not seen, has the imperfect vagueness of human thought. The fear grows shadowy; and Imagination, the enemy of men, the father of all terrors, unstimulated, sinks to rest in the dullness of exhausted emotion.Joseph Conrad / quote ↗
20UndatedThere are the girls we love, the men we look up to, the tenderness, the friendships, the opportunities, the pleasures! But the fact remains that you must touch your reward with clean hands, lest it turn to dead leaves, to thorns, in your grasp.Joseph Conrad / quote ↗
21UndatedThere are many shades in the danger of adventures and gales, and it is only now and then that there appears on the face of facts a sinister violence of intention- that indefinable something which forces it upon the mind and the heart of a man, that this complication of accidents or these elemental furies are coming at him with a purpose of malice, with a strength beyond control, with an unbridled cruelty that means to tear out of him his hope and his fear, the pain of his fatigue and his longing for rest: which means to smash, to destroy, to annihilate all he has seen, known, loved, enjoyed, or hated; all that is priceless and necessary- the sunshine, the memories, the future,- which means to sweep the whole precious world utterly away from his sight by the simple and appalling act of taking his life.Joseph Conrad / quote ↗
22UndatedThere werethings, he said mournfully, that perhaps could never be told, only hehad lived so much alone that sometimes he forgot--he forgot. The lighthad destroyed the assurance which had inspired him in the distantshadows.Joseph Conrad / quote ↗
23UndatedLiberty of imagination should be the most precious possession of a novelist. To try voluntarily to discover the fettering dogmas of its own inspiration, is a trick worthy of humna perverseness which, after inventing an absurdity, endeavours to find for it a pedigree of distinguished ancestors...Joseph Conrad / quote ↗
