Quote

I can't tell if a straw ever saved a drowning man, but I know that a mere glance is enough to make dspair pause. For in truth, we who are creatures of impulse, are creatures of despair.

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
Tell
Glances
Truth
Drowning
Ever
Pauses
Enough
Impulse
Straw
Make
Saved
Gothic
Men
Despair
Straws
Love
Mere
Glance
Creatures
Pause

More quotes by Joseph Conrad

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A ship in dock, surrounded by quays and the walls of warehouses, has the appearance of a prisoner meditating upon freedom in the sadness of a free spirit put under restraint.
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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.
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Some of us, regarding the ocean with understanding and affection, have seen it looking old, as if the immemorial ages had been stirred up from the undisturbed bottom of ooze. For it is a gale of wind that makes the sea look old.
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Fiction is history, human history, or it is nothing.
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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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One can't live with one's finger everlastingly on one's pulse.
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Being myself animated by feelings of affection toward my fellowmen, I am saddened by the modern system of advertising. Whatever evidence it offers of enterprise, ingenuity, impudence, and resource in certain individuals, it proves to my mind the wide prevalence of that form of mental degradation which is called gullibility.
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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.
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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.
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Lights of ships moved in the fairway-a great stir of lights going up and going down. And farther west on the upper reaches the place of the monstrous town was still marked ominously on the sky, a brooding gloom in sunshine, a lurid glare under the stars.
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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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Beyond the fence the forest stood up spectrally in the moonlight, and through the dim stir, through the faint sounds of that lamentable courtyard, the silence of the land went home to one's very heart - its mystery, its greatness, the amazing reality of its concealed life.
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A writing may be lost a lie may be written but what the eye has seen is truth and remains in the mind!
Joseph Conrad
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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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Words, as is well known, are the great foes of reality.
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To have his path made clear for him is the aspiration of every human being in our beclouded and tempestuous existence.
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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The Nellie, a cruising yawl, swung to her anchor without a flutter of the sails, and was at rest. The flood had made, the wind was nearly calm, and being bound down the river, the only thing for it was to come and wait for the turn of the tide.
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The hair of his face, on the contrary, carroty and flaming, resembled a growth of copper wire clipped short to the line of the lip while, no matter how close he shaved, fiery metallic gleams passed, when he moved his head, over the surface of his cheeks.
Joseph Conrad
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Every age is fed on illusions, lest men should renounce life early and the human race come to an end.
Joseph Conrad