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All ambitions are lawful except those which climb upward on the miseries or credulities of mankind.

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
Misery
Ambition
Lawful
Except
Miseries
Mankind
Credulity
Feet
Upward
Literature
Ambitions
Climb
Climbs

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Perhaps life is just that... a dream and a fear.
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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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We couldn't understand because we were too far... and could not remember because we were traveling in the night of first ages, those ages that had gone, leaving hardly a sign... and no memories.
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A fool has more ideas than a wise man can foresee.
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It is respectable to have no illusions, and safe, and profitable and dull.
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He hated all this, and somehow he couldn't get away.
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It made you feel very small, very lost, and yet it was not altogether depressing, that feeling. After all, if you were small, the grimy beetle crawled on - which was just what you wanted it to do.
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I do not know whether I have been a good seaman, but I know I have been a very faithful one.
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Necessity, they say, is mother of invention, but fear, too, is not barren of ingenious suggestions.
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Watching a coast as it slips by the ship is like thinking about an enigma. There it is before you, smiling, frowning, inviting, grand, mean, insipid, or savage, and always mute with an air of whispering, Come and find out.
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The artist appeals to that part of our being which is not dependent on wisdom to that in us which is a gift and not an acquisition-and therefore, more permanently enduring. He speaks to our capacity for delight and wonder, to the sense of mystery surrounding our lives to our sense of pity, and beauty and pain.
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A word carries far, very far, deals destruction through time as the bullets go flying through space.
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I like what is in the work -- the chance to find yourself.
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My task, which I am trying to achieve is, by the power of the written word, to make you hear, to make you feel--it is, before all, to make you see.
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Joy and sorrow in this world pass into each other, mingling their forms and their murmurs in the twilight of life as mysterious as an overshadowed ocean, while the dazzling brightness of supreme hopes lies far off, fascinating and still, on the distant edge of the horizon
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The East Wind, an interloper in the dominions of Westerly Weather, is an impassive-faced tyrant with a sharp poniard held behind his back for a treacherous stab.
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The vision seemed to enter the house with me-the stretcher, the phantom-bearers, the wild crowd of obedient worshippers, the gloom of the forests, the glitter of the reach between the murky bends, the beat of the drum, regular and muffled like the beating of a heart-the heart of a conquering darkness.
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Let them think what they liked, but I didn't mean to drown myself. I meant to swim till I sank -- but that's not the same thing.
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Being myself animated by feelings of affection toward my fellowmen, I am saddened by the modern system of advertising. Whatever evidence it offers of enterprise, ingenuity, impudence, and resource in certain individuals, it proves to my mind the wide prevalence of that form of mental degradation which is called gullibility.
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It is my belief no man ever understands quite his own artful dodges to escape from the grim shadow of self knowledge.
Joseph Conrad