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Yet, when one thinks of it, diplomacy without force is a but a rotten reed to lean upon.

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
Rotten
Thinks
Upon
Force
Without
Reed
Thinking
Reeds
Diplomacy
Lean

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Woe to the man whose heart has not learned while young to hope, to love - and to put its trust in life.
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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 couldn't have felt more of lonely desolation somehow, had I been robbed of a belief or had missed my destiny in life.
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In the empty immensity of earth, sky, and water, there she was, incomprehensible, firing into a continent.
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I have wrestled with death. It is the most unexciting contest you can imagine.
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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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I am afraid that if you want to go down into history you'll have to do something for it.
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Books may be written in all sorts of places. Verbal inspiration may enter the berth of a mariner on board a ship frozen fast in a river in the middle of a town.
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Watching a coast as it slips by the ship is like thinking about an enigma. There it is before you, smiling, frowning, inviting, grand, mean, insipid, or savage, and always mute with an air of whispering, Come and find out.
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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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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.
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Art is long and life is short, and success is very far off.
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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.
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A fool has more ideas than a wise man can foresee.
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Mathematics commands all my respect, but I have no use for engines.
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The artist appeals to that part of our being which is not dependent on wisdom to that in us which is a gift and not an acquisition-and therefore, more permanently enduring. He speaks to our capacity for delight and wonder, to the sense of mystery surrounding our lives to our sense of pity, and beauty and pain.
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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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I can't imagine a human being so hard up for something to do as to quarrel with me.
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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.
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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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