Quote

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.

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
Find
Savages
Frowning
Come
Slips
Insipid
Mean
Coast
Enigma
Always
Ship
Mute
Thinking
Grand
Inviting
Like
Ships
Whispering
Watching
Savage
Air
Smiling

More quotes by Joseph Conrad

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Ah! These commercial interests -- spoiling the finest life under the sun. Why must the sea be used for trade -- and for war as well?...It would have been so much nicer just to sail about, with here and there a port and a bit of land to stretch one's legs on, buy a few books and get a change of cooking for a while.
Joseph Conrad
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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.
Joseph Conrad
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The condemned social order has not been built up on paper and ink, and I don't fancy that a combination of paper and ink will ever put an end to it.
Joseph Conrad
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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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The world of finance is a mysterious world in which, incredible as the fact may appear, evaporation precedes liquidation.
Joseph Conrad
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The question is not how to get cured, but how to live.
Joseph Conrad
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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.
Joseph Conrad
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Droll thing life is -- that mysterious arrangement of merciless logic for a futile purpose. The most you can hope from it is some knowledge of yourself -- that comes too late -- a crop of inextinguishable regrets.
Joseph Conrad
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She feared the unknown as we all do, and her ignorance made the unknown infinitely vast.
Joseph Conrad
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I couldn't have felt more of lonely desolation somehow, had I been robbed of a belief or had missed my destiny in life.
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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It is my belief no man ever understands quite his own artful dodges to escape from the grim shadow of self knowledge.
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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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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Everybody had to be thoroughly understood before being accepted.
Joseph Conrad
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Any fool can carry on, but a wise man knows how to shorten sail in time.
Joseph Conrad
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There is a kind way of assisting our fellow-creatures which is enough to break their hearts while it saves their outer envelope.
Joseph Conrad
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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
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I remember my youth and the feeling that will never come back any more
Joseph Conrad
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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.
Joseph Conrad