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Art is long and life is short, and success is very far off.

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
Writing
Long
Life
Short
Success
Art

More quotes by Joseph Conrad

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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.
Joseph Conrad
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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.
Joseph Conrad
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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.
Joseph Conrad
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One can't live with one's finger everlastingly on one's pulse.
Joseph Conrad
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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.
Joseph Conrad
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Hang ideas! They are tramps, vagabonds, knocking at the back-door of your mind, each taking a little of your substance, each carrying away some crumb of that belief in a few simple notions you must cling to if you want to live decently and would like to die easy!
Joseph Conrad
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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.
Joseph Conrad
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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.
Joseph Conrad
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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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As to honor - you know - it's a very fine mediaeval inheritance which women never got hold of. It wasn't theirs.
Joseph Conrad
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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
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... it was written I should be loyal to the nightmare of my choice.
Joseph Conrad
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Fiction is history, human history, or it is nothing.
Joseph Conrad
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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.
Joseph Conrad
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Only in men's imagination does every truth find an effective and undeniable existence. Imagination, not invention, is the supreme master of art as of life.
Joseph Conrad
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I am afraid that if you want to go down into history you'll have to do something for it.
Joseph Conrad
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I was constantly watching myself, my secret self, as dependent on my actions as my own personality
Joseph Conrad
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Follow your bliss. Find where it is and don't be afraid to follow it.
Joseph Conrad
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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
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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.
Joseph Conrad