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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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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
Fool
Wise
Shorten
Funny
Nautical
Inspirational
Yacht
Men
Sailing
Time
Sail
Boat
Carry

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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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There is a subtle and unmistakable touch of love and pride, beyond mere skill, almost an inspiration which gives to all work that finish which is almost art - which is art.
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Going home must be like going to render an account.
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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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A man that is born falls into a dream like a man who falls into the sea.
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Everybody had to be thoroughly understood before being accepted.
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Your strength is just an accident owed to the weakness of others.
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Writing in English is like throwing mud at a wall.
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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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In order to move others deeply we must deliberately allow ourselves to be carried away beyond the bounds of our normal sensibility.
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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.
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All ambitions are lawful except those which climb upward on the miseries or credulities of mankind.
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Mathematics commands all my respect, but I have no use for engines.
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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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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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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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Everything belonged to him. It made me hold my breath in expectation of hearing the wilderness burst into prodigious peal of laughter that would shake the fixed stars in their places.
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Violence is not a catalyst but a diversion.
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The artist appeals to that part of our being...which is a gift and not an acquisition - and, therefore, more permanently enduring.
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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