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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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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
Look
Redeems
Looks
Pretence
Thing
Conquest
Much
Sentimental
Pretty
Idea
Earth
Ideas

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One can't live with one's finger everlastingly on one's pulse.
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Give me the right word and the right accent and I will move the world.
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A fool has more ideas than a wise man can foresee.
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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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The scrupulous and the just, the noble, humane, and devoted natures the unselfish and the intelligent may begin a movement - but it passes away from them. They are not the leaders of a revolution. They are its victims.
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Fiction is history, human history, or it is nothing.
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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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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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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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I do not know whether I have been a good seaman, but I know I have been a very faithful one.
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A word carries far, very far, deals destruction through time as the bullets go flying through space.
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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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I have wrestled with death. It is the most unexciting contest you can imagine.
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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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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.
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The last thing a woman will consent to in a man whom she loves, or on whom she simply depends, is want of courage.
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Writing in English is like throwing mud at a wall.
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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.
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It seems to me I am trying to tell you a dream - making a vain attempt, because no relation of a dream can convey the dream-sensation, that commingling of absurdity, surprise, and bewilderment in a tremor of struggling revolt, that notion of being captured by the incredible which is of the very essence of dreams.
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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.
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