Joseph Conrad Quotes

“We live as we dream--alone....”

“It was written I should be loyal to the nightmare of my choice.”

“I don’t like work--no man does--but I like what is in the work--the chance to find yourself. Your own reality--for yourself not for others--what no other man can ever know. They can only see the mere show, and never can tell what it really means.”

“Your strength is just an accident arising from the weakness of others.”

“No, it is impossible; it is impossible to convey the life-sensation of any given epoch of one’s existence--that which makes its truth, its meaning--its subtle and penetrating essence. It is impossible.”

“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.”

“The mind of man is capable of anything.”

“He struggled with himself, too. I saw it -- I heard it. I saw the inconceivable mystery of a soul that knew no restraint, no faith, and no fear, yet struggling blindly with itself.”

“But his soul was mad. Being alone in the wilderness, it had looked within itself and, by heavens I tell you, it had gone mad.”

“We live in the flicker -- may it last as long as the old earth keeps rolling! But darkness was here yesterday.”

“The horror! The horror!”

“You know I hate, detest, and can’t bear a lie, not because I am straighter than the rest of us, but simply because it appalls me. 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.”

“Even extreme grief may ultimately vent itself in violence--but more generally takes the form of apathy”

“We penetrated deeper and deeper into the heart of darkness.”

“It echoed loudly within him because he was hollow at the core.”

“Like a running blaze on a plain, like a flash of lightning in the clouds. We live in the flicker.”

“I have wrestled with death. It is the most unexciting contest you can imagine. It takes place in an impalpable greyness, with nothing underfoot, with nothing around, without spectators, without clamour, without glory, without the great desire of victory, without the great fear of defeat, in a sickly atmosphere of tepid scepticism, without much belief in your own right, and still less in that of your adversary.”

“They trespassed upon my thoughts. They were intruders whose knowledge of life was to me an irritating pretense, because I felt so sure they could not possibly know the things I knew. Their bearing, which was simply the bearing of commonplace individuals going about their business in the assurance of perfect safety, was offensive to me like the outrageous flauntings of folly in the face of a danger it is unable to comprehend. I had no particular desire to enlighten them, but I had some difficulty in restraining myself from laughing in their faces, so full of stupid importance.”

“Do you see the story? Do you see anything? 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 the very essence of dreams...”

“I couldn’t have felt more of lonely desolation somehow, had I been robbed of a belief or had missed my destiny in life...”

“He hated all this, and somehow he couldn’t get away.”

“One can’t live with one’s finger everlastingly on one’s pulse.”

“His face was like the autumn sky, overcast one moment and bright the next.”

“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.”

“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.”

“the sea itself, which is the mistress of his existence and as inscrutable as Destiny.”

“Yes; 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!”

“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.”

“What redeems it is the idea only. An idea at the back of it; not a sentimental pretence but an idea; and an unselfish belief in the idea—something you can set up, and bow down before, and offer a sacrifice to....”

“I wondered whether the stillness on the face of the immensity looking at us two were meant as an appeal or as a menace.”

“That animal has a charmed life,′ he said; ‘but you can say this only of brutes in this country. No man—you apprehend me?—no man here bears a charmed life.’

“To tear treasure out of the bowels of the land was their desire, with no more moral purpose at the back of it than there is in burglars breaking into a safe.”

“There were moments when one’s past came back to one, as it will sometimes when you have not a moment to spare for yourself;”

“After all, for a seaman, to scrape the bottom of the thing that’ s supposed to float all the time under his care is the unpardonable sin. No one may know of it, but you never forget the thump—eh? A blow on the very heart. You remember it, you dream of it, you wake up at night and think of it—years after—and go hot and cold all over.”

“The dawns were heralded by the descent of a chill stillness; the wood-cutters slept, their fires burned low; the snapping of a twig would make you start. We were wanderers on a prehistoric earth, on an earth that wore the aspect of an unknown planet.”

“Of course, a fool, what with sheer fright and fine sentiments, is always safe.”

“I looked around, and I don’t know why, but I assure you that never, never before, did this land, this river, this jungle, the very arch of this blazing sky, appear to me so hopeless and so dark, so impenetrable to human thought, so pitiless to human weakness.”

“What made this emotion so overpowering was—how shall I define it?-the moral shock I received, as if something altogether monstrous, intolerable to thought and odious to the soul, had been thrust upon me unexpectedly.”

“I did not betray Mr. Kurtz—it was ordered I should never betray him—it was written I should be loyal to the nightmare of my choice.”

“But both the diabolic love and the unearthly hate of the mysteries it had penetrated fought for the possession of that soul”

“You show them you have in you something that is really profitable, and then there will be no limits to the recognition of your ability,”

“Droll thing life is—that mysterious arrangement of merciless logic for a futile purpose.”

“Perhaps all the wisdom, and all truth, and all sincerity, are just compressed into that inappreciable moment of time in which we step over the threshold of the invisible.”

“I thought his memory was like the other memories of the dead that accumulate in every man’s life—a vague impress on the brain of shadows that had fallen on it in their swift and final passage;”

“I said with something like despair in my heart, but bowing my head before the faith that was in her, before that great and saving illusion that shone with an unearthly glow in the darkness, in the triumphant darkness from which I could not have defended her—from which I could not even defend myself.”

″‘His end,’ said I, with dull anger stirring in me, ‘was in every way worthy of his life.‘”

″‘The last word he pronounced was—your name.‘”