Quote

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.

Joseph Conrad

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Joseph Conrad
Age: 66 †
Born: 1857
Born: December 3
Died: 1924
Died: August 3
Author
Autobiographer
Essayist
Novelist
Science Fiction Writer
Screenwriter
Writer
Berdichev
Jozef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski
Talk
Betraying
Friends
Sweetheart
Firsts
Betrayed
First
Betrayal
Country
Bond
Must
Betray
Men
Conscience
Moral

More quotes by Joseph Conrad

Image
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 appals 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.
Joseph Conrad
Image
Sleep after toyle, port after stormie seas, Ease after warre, death after life, does greatly please.
Joseph Conrad
Image
Being a woman is a terribly difficult task, since it consists principally in dealing with men.
Joseph Conrad
Image
For there is nothing mysterious to a seaman unless it be the sea itself, which is the mistress of his existence.
Joseph Conrad
Image
To be busy with material affairs is the best preservative against reflection, fears, doubts ... all these things which stand in the way of achievement. I suppose a fellow proposing to cut his throat would experience a sort of relief while occupied in stropping his razor carefully.
Joseph Conrad
Image
To be a great autocrat you must be a great barbarian.
Joseph Conrad
Image
Danger lies in the writer becoming the victim of his own exaggeration, losing the exact notion of sincerity, and in the end coming to despise truth itself as something too cold, too blunt for his purpose -- as, in fact, not good enough for his insistent emotion. From laughter and tears the descent is easy to sniveling and giggles.
Joseph Conrad
Image
What is a novel if not a conviction of our fellow men's existence strong enough to take upon itself a form of imagined life clearer than reality and whose accumulated verisimilitude of selected episodes puts to shame the pride of documentary history.
Joseph Conrad
Image
The offing was barred by a black bank of clouds, and the tranquil water-way leading to the uttermost ends of the earth flowed somber under an overcast sky--seemed to lead into the heart of an immense darkness.
Joseph Conrad
Image
The artist in his calling of interpreter creates because he must. He is so much of a voice that, for him, silence is like death
Joseph Conrad
Image
All creative art is magic, is evocation of the unseen in forms persuasive, enlightening, familiar and surprising.
Joseph Conrad
Image
That's why love is so inseparable from any talk about truth and death, because we know that love is fundamentally a death of an old self that was isolated and the emergence of a new self now entangled with another self, the self that you fall in love with.
Joseph Conrad
Image
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
Image
Happiness, happiness ... the flavor is with you-with you alone, and you can make it as intoxicating as you please.
Joseph Conrad
Image
Follow your bliss. Find where it is and don't be afraid to follow it.
Joseph Conrad
Image
You can't, in sound morals, condemn a man for taking care of his own integrity. It is his clear duty.
Joseph Conrad
Image
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
Image
Necessity, they say, is mother of invention, but fear, too, is not barren of ingenious suggestions.
Joseph Conrad
Image
For a moment I had a view of a world that seemed to wear a vast and dismal aspect of disorder, while, in truth, thanks to our unwearied efforts, it is as sunny an arrangement of small conveniences as the mind of man can conceive.
Joseph Conrad
Image
It would take too long to explain the intimate alliance of contradictions in human nature which makes love itself wear at times the desperate shape of betrayal. And perhaps there is no possible explanation.
Joseph Conrad