Quote

You can't breathe dead hippo waking, sleeping, and eating, and at the same time keep your precarious grip on existence.

Joseph Conrad

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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
Breathe
Eating
Dead
Sleep
Hippo
Existence
Precarious
Grip
Literature
Sleeping
Keep
Waking
Time

More quotes by Joseph Conrad

Image
A man that is born falls into a dream like a man who falls into the sea.
Joseph Conrad
Image
All creative art is magic , is evocation of the unseen in forms persuasive, enlightening, familiar and surprising, for the edification of mankind , pinned down by the conditions of its existence to the earnest consideration of the most insignificant tides of reality .
Joseph Conrad
Image
Any work that aspires, however humbly, to the condition of art should carry its justification in every line.
Joseph Conrad
Image
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
Image
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.
Joseph Conrad
Image
Madness alone is truly terrifying, inasmuch as you cannot placate it by threats, persuasion, or bribes.
Joseph Conrad
Image
A train of thought is never false. The falsehood lies deep in the necessities of existence.
Joseph Conrad
Image
I let him run on, this papier-maché Mephistopheles, and it seemed to me that if I tried I could poke my forefinger through him, and would find nothing inside but a little loose dirt, maybe.
Joseph Conrad
Image
A nickname may be the best record of a success. That's what I call putting the face of a joke upon the body of a truth.
Joseph Conrad
Image
Writing in English is like throwing mud at a wall.
Joseph Conrad
Image
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
Image
There is no credulity so eager and blind as the credulity of covetousness, which, in its universal extent, measures the moral misery and the intellectual destitution of mankind.
Joseph Conrad
Image
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
Image
All one's work might have been better done but this is a sort of reflection a worker must put aside courageously if he doesn't mean every one of his conceptions to remain forever a private vision, an evanescent reverie.
Joseph Conrad
Image
The blight of futility that lies in wait for men's speeches had fallen upon our conversation and made it a thing of empty sounds.
Joseph Conrad
Image
It's only those who do nothing that make no mistakes, I suppose.
Joseph Conrad
Image
Your strength is just an accident owed to the weakness of others.
Joseph Conrad
Image
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
Image
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
Image
Words, as is well known, are the great foes of reality.
Joseph Conrad