Quote

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

More quotes by Joseph Conrad

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Art is long and life is short, and success is very far off.
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For a time I would feel I belonged still to a world of straightforward facts but the feeling would not last long. Something would turn up to scare it away.
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Beyond the fence the forest stood up spectrally in the moonlight, and through the dim stir, through the faint sounds of that lamentable courtyard, the silence of the land went home to one's very heart - its mystery, its greatness, the amazing reality of its concealed life.
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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.
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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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Sleep after toyle, port after stormie seas, Ease after warre, death after life, does greatly please.
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Nations it may be have fashioned their Governments, but the Governments have paid them back in the same coin.
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It is respectable to have no illusions, and safe, and profitable and dull.
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She feared the unknown as we all do, and her ignorance made the unknown infinitely vast.
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The conquest of the earth... is not a pretty thing when you look into it too much. What redeems it is the idea only... not a sentimental pretence but an idea.
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Madness alone is truly terrifying, inasmuch as you cannot placate it by threats, persuasion, or bribes.
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A nickname may be the best record of a success. That's what I call putting the face of a joke upon the body of a truth.
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They had behind them, to my mind, the terrific suggestiveness of words heard in dreams, of phrases spoken in nightmares.
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Lights of ships moved in the fairway-a great stir of lights going up and going down. And farther west on the upper reaches the place of the monstrous town was still marked ominously on the sky, a brooding gloom in sunshine, a lurid glare under the stars.
Joseph Conrad
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One wonders that there can be found a man courageous enough to occupy the post. It is a matter of meditation. Having given it a few minutes I come to the conclusion in the serenity of my heart and the peace of my conscience that he must be either an extreme megalomaniac or an utterly unconscious being.
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It is not the clear-sighted who rule the world. Great achievements are accomplished in a blessed, warm fog.
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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.
Joseph Conrad
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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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Violence is not a catalyst but a diversion.
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In the time of Spanish rule, and for many years afterwards, the town of Sulaco--the luxuriant beauty of the orange gardens bears witness to its antiquity--had never been commercially anything more important than a coasting port with a fairly large local trade in ox-hides and indigo.
Joseph Conrad