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Fiction is history, human history, or it is nothing.

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
Fiction
History
Human
Humans
Nothing

More quotes by Joseph Conrad

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Happiness, happiness ... the flavor is with you-with you alone, and you can make it as intoxicating as you please.
Joseph Conrad
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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.
Joseph Conrad
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Facing it, always facing it, that's the way to get through. Face it.
Joseph Conrad
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I remember my youth and the feeling that will never come back any more
Joseph Conrad
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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.
Joseph Conrad
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That's why love is so inseparable from any talk about truth and death, because we know that love is fundamentally a death of an old self that was isolated and the emergence of a new self now entangled with another self, the self that you fall in love with.
Joseph Conrad
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Nations it may be have fashioned their Governments, but the Governments have paid them back in the same coin.
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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Things and men have always a certain sense, a certain side by which they must be got hold of if one wants to obtain a solid grasp and a perfect command.
Joseph Conrad
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One can't live with one's finger everlastingly on one's pulse.
Joseph Conrad
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A man is a worker. If he is not that he is nothing.
Joseph Conrad
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To be a great autocrat you must be a great barbarian.
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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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
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The conquest of the earth... is not a pretty thing when you look into it too much. What redeems it is the idea only... not a sentimental pretence but an idea.
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 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.
Joseph Conrad
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A fool has more ideas than a wise man can foresee.
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.
Joseph Conrad
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But his soul was mad. Being alone in the wilderness, it had looked within itself and, by heavens I tell you, it had gone mad.
Joseph Conrad