The collection / 182 fragments

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Passages, proverbs, and questions carried across the ages.

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182 results · Page 3 of 8Play this collection ▷

01Undated

The mind of man is capable of anything.

Joseph Conrad / quote

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02Undated

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?--buttruth--truth stripped of its cloak of time.

Joseph Conrad / quote

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03Undated

But when one is young one must see things, gather experience, ideas; enlarge the mind.

Joseph Conrad / quote

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04Undated

The mind of man is capable of anything - because everything is in it, all the past as well as the future.

Joseph Conrad / quote

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05Undated

They 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

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06Undated

It 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

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07Undated

The 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 universe

Joseph Conrad / quote

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08Undated

I 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

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09Undated

He 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

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10Undated

There 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

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11Undated

Fiction, 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

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12Undated

Over the lives borne from under the shadow of death there seems to fall the shadow of madness.

Joseph Conrad / quote

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13Undated

It was not my strength that wanted nursing, it was my imagination that wanted soothing.

Joseph Conrad / quote

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14Undated

I 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

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15Undated

All 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

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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

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17Undated

There is a weird power in a spoken word.

Joseph Conrad / quote

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18Undated

Even extreme grief may ultimately ventitself in violence--but more generally takes the form of apathy

Joseph Conrad / quote

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19Undated

He 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

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20Undated

There 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

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21Undated

There 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

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22Undated

There 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

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23Undated

Liberty 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

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24Undated

We live as we dream--alone....

Joseph Conrad / quote

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