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The sea - this truth must be confessed - has no generosity. No display of manly qualities - courage, hardihood, endurance, faithfulness - has ever been known to touch its irresponsible consciousness of power.

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
Power
Touch
Faithfulness
Ever
Sea
Manly
Must
Courage
Irresponsible
Consciousness
Endurance
Quality
Inequality
Literature
Display
Known
Generosity
Hardihood
Truth
Qualities
Confessed

More quotes by Joseph Conrad

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I let him run on, this papier-maché Mephistopheles, and it seemed to me that if I tried I could poke my forefinger through him, and would find nothing inside but a little loose dirt, maybe.
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And suddenly I rejoiced in the great security of the sea as compared with the unrest of the land, in my choice of that untempted life presenting no disquieting problems, invested with an elementary moral beauty by the absolute straightforwardness of its appeal and by the singleness of its purpose.
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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.
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To be a great autocrat you must be a great barbarian.
Joseph Conrad
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For there is nothing mysterious to a seaman unless it be the sea itself, which is the mistress of his existence.
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The atmosphere of officialdom would kill anything that breathes the air of human endeavour, would extinguish hope and fear alike in the supremacy of paper and ink.
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the mind of man is capable of anything--because everything is in it, all the past as well as the future
Joseph Conrad
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Any fool can carry on, but a wise man knows how to shorten sail in time.
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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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Follow your bliss. Find where it is and don't be afraid to follow it.
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You can't breathe dead hippo waking, sleeping, and eating, and at the same time keep your precarious grip on existence.
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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.
Joseph Conrad
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Everybody had to be thoroughly understood before being accepted.
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Nowhere else than upon the sea do the days, weeks, and months fall away quicker into the past. They seem to be left astern as easily as the light air-bubbles in the swirls of the ship's wake.
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Do not talk to me of Archimedes' lever. He was an absent-minded person with a mathematical imagination. Mathematics commands my respect, but I have no use for engines. Give me the right word and the right accent and I will move the world.
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In plucking the fruit of memory one runs the risk of spoiling its bloom, especially if it has got to be carried into the market.
Joseph Conrad
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Your strength is just an accident owed to the weakness of others.
Joseph Conrad
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I can't tell if a straw ever saved a drowning man, but I know that a mere glance is enough to make dspair pause. For in truth, we who are creatures of impulse, are creatures of despair.
Joseph Conrad
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Writing in English is like throwing mud at a wall.
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Books may be written in all sorts of places. Verbal inspiration may enter the berth of a mariner on board a ship frozen fast in a river in the middle of a town.
Joseph Conrad