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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

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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
Mistress
Mysterious
Sea
Unless
Existence
Nothing
Seaman
Seamen
Inscrutable

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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.
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The very young have, properly speaking, no moments. It is the privilege of early youth to live in advance of its days in all the beautiful continuity of hope which knows no pauses and no introspection.
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It is when we try to grapple with another man's intimate need that we perceive how incomprehensible, wavering, and misty are the beings that share with us the sight of the stars and the warmth of the sun.
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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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As to honor - you know - it's a very fine mediaeval inheritance which women never got hold of. It wasn't theirs.
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There is a taint of death, a flavour of mortality in lies.
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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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Gossip is what no one claims to like, but everybody enjoys.
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I take it that what all men are really after is some form or perhaps only some formula of peace.
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What is a novel if not a conviction of our fellow men's existence strong enough to take upon itself a form of imagined life clearer than reality and whose accumulated verisimilitude of selected episodes puts to shame the pride of documentary history.
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A task, any task, undertaken in an adventurous spirit acquires the merit of romance.
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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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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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Being a lady is a frightfully troublesome assignment, since it comprises mainly in managing men.
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It’s extraordinary how we go through life with eyes half shut, with dull ears, with dormant thoughts. Perhaps it’s just as well and it may be that it is this very dullness that makes life to the incalculable majority so supportable and so welcome.
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It is not Justice the servant of men, but accident, hazard, Fortune-the ally of patient Time-that holds an even and scrupulous balance.
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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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The good author is he who contemplates without marked joy or excessive sorrow the adventures of his soul amongst criticisms.
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... it was written I should be loyal to the nightmare of my choice.
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The ocean has the conscienceless temper of a savage autocrat spoiled by much adulation
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