Joseph Conrad

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

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

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

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.

They talk of a man betraying his country, his friends, his sweetheart. There must be a moral bond first. All a man can betray is his conscience.

An artist is a man of action, whether he creates a personality, invents an expedient, or finds the issue of a complicated situation.

How does one kill fear, I wonder? How do you shoot a specter through the heart, slash off its spectral head, take it by its spectral throat?

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.

It is respectable to have no illusions, and safe, and profitable and dull.

It is a maudlin and indecent verity that comes out through the strength of wine.

I had ambition not only to go farther than any man had ever been before, but as far as it was possible for a man to go.

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.

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.

A man's most open actions have a secret side to them.

Going home must be like going to render an account.

A caricature is putting the face of a joke on the body of a truth.

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

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.

Words, as is well known, are the great foes of reality.

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