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

Joseph Conrad

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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
Illusion
Safe
Illusions
Respectable
Profitable
Ironic
Irony
Dull

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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.
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All creative art is magic, is evocation of the unseen in forms persuasive, enlightening, familiar and surprising.
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In the empty immensity of earth, sky, and water, there she was, incomprehensible, firing into a continent.
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You can't, in sound morals, condemn a man for taking care of his own integrity. It is his clear duty.
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Necessity, they say, is mother of invention, but fear, too, is not barren of ingenious suggestions.
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Every age is fed on illusions, lest men should renounce life early and the human race come to an end.
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I take it that what all men are really after is some form or perhaps only some formula of peace.
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I have wrestled with death. It is the most unexciting contest you can imagine.
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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.
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Being a lady is a frightfully troublesome assignment, since it comprises mainly in managing men.
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Fiction is history, human history, or it is nothing.
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All ambitions are lawful except those which climb upward on the miseries or credulities of mankind.
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Everything belonged to him. It made me hold my breath in expectation of hearing the wilderness burst into prodigious peal of laughter that would shake the fixed stars in their places.
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Facing it, always facing it, that's the way to get through. Face it.
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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.
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It is when we try to grapple with another man's intimate need that we perceive how incomprehensible, wavering, and misty are the beings that share with us the sight of the stars and the warmth of the sun.
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I can't imagine a human being so hard up for something to do as to quarrel with me.
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An artist is a man of action, whether he creates a personality, invents an expedient, or finds the issue of a complicated situation.
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His very existence was improbable, inexplicable, and altogether bewildering. He was an insoluble problem. It was inconceivable how he had existed, how he had succeeded in getting so far, how he had managed to remain -- why he did not instantly disappear.
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All one's work might have been better done but this is a sort of reflection a worker must put aside courageously if he doesn't mean every one of his conceptions to remain forever a private vision, an evanescent reverie.
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