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I have wrestled with death. It is the most unexciting contest you can imagine.

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
Contests
Imagine
Death
Unexciting
Clamour
Wrestled
Contest

More quotes by Joseph Conrad

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There is nothing more enticing, disenchanting, and enslaving than the life at sea.
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This magnificent butterfly finds a little heap of dirt and sits still on it but man will never on his heap of mud keep still.
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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.
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She feared the unknown as we all do, and her ignorance made the unknown infinitely vast.
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A train of thought is never false. The falsehood lies deep in the necessities of existence.
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You know I hate, detest, and can't bear a lie, not because I am straighter than the rest of us, but simply because it appals me. There is a taint of death, a flavour of mortality in lies - which is exactly what I hate and detest in the world - what I want to forget.
Joseph Conrad
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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.
Joseph Conrad
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Gossip is what no one claims to like, but everybody enjoys.
Joseph Conrad
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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.
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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His very existence was improbable, inexplicable, and altogether bewildering. He was an insoluble problem. It was inconceivable how he had existed, how he had succeeded in getting so far, how he had managed to remain -- why he did not instantly disappear.
Joseph Conrad
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For all that has been said of the love that certain natures (on shore) have professed for it, for all the celebrations it has been the object of in prose and song, the sea has never been friendly to man. At most it has been the accomplice of human restlessness.
Joseph Conrad
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Books may be written in all sorts of places. Verbal inspiration may enter the berth of a mariner on board a ship frozen fast in a river in the middle of a town.
Joseph Conrad
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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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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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He who wants to persuade should put his trust not in the right argument, but in the right word. The power of sound has always been greater than the power of sense.
Joseph Conrad
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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.
Joseph Conrad
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An artist is a man of action, whether he creates a personality, invents an expedient, or finds the issue of a complicated situation.
Joseph Conrad
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I saw him open his mouth wide. . . as though he had wanted to swallow all the air, all the earth, all the men before him.
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