Quote

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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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
Fear
Bureaucracy
Anything
Alike
Human
Atmosphere
Humans
Breathe
Extinguish
Would
Air
Breathes
Kill
Ink
Paper
Endeavour
Hope
Supremacy

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Truth of a modest sort I can promise you, and also sincerity. That complete, praiseworthy sincerity which, while it delivers one into the hands of one's enemies, is as likely as not to embroil one with one's friends.
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Danger lies in the writer becoming the victim of his own exaggeration, losing the exact notion of sincerity, and in the end coming to despise truth itself as something too cold, too blunt for his purpose -- as, in fact, not good enough for his insistent emotion. From laughter and tears the descent is easy to sniveling and giggles.
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The question is not how to get cured, but how to live.
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They had behind them, to my mind, the terrific suggestiveness of words heard in dreams, of phrases spoken in nightmares.
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Let them think what they liked, but I didn't mean to drown myself. I meant to swim till I sank -- but that's not the same thing.
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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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All creative art is magic, is evocation of the unseen in forms persuasive, enlightening, familiar and surprising.
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There is something haunting in the light of the moon it has all the dispassionateness of a disembodied soul, and something of its inconceivable mystery.
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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.
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Words, as is well known, are the great foes of reality.
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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.
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You can't, in sound morals, condemn a man for taking care of his own integrity. It is his clear duty.
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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.
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The discovery of America was the occasion of the greatest outburst of cruelty and reckless greed known in history.
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They talk of a man betraying his country, his friends, his sweetheart. There must be a moral bond first. All a man can betray is his conscience.
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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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A writing may be lost a lie may be written but what the eye has seen is truth and remains in the mind!
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That faculty of beholding at a hint the face of his desire and the shape of his dream, without which the earth would know no lover and no adventurer.
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Gossip is what no one claims to like, but everybody enjoys.
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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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