Quote

The blight of futility that lies in wait for men's speeches had fallen upon our conversation and made it a thing of empty sounds.

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
Made
Speech
Men
Lies
Blight
Conversation
Futility
Waiting
Speeches
Lying
Fallen
Upon
Sounds
Sound
Wait
Thing
Empty

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A writer without interest or sympathy for the foibles of his fellow man is not conceivable as a writer.
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Going home must be like going to render an account.
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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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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 human heart is vast enough to contain all the world.
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The ocean has the conscienceless temper of a savage autocrat spoiled by much adulation
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Follow your bliss. Find where it is and don't be afraid to follow it.
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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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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.
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We can never cease to be ourselves.
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Necessity, they say, is mother of invention, but fear, too, is not barren of ingenious suggestions.
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All one's work might have been better done but this is a sort of reflection a worker must put aside courageously if he doesn't mean every one of his conceptions to remain forever a private vision, an evanescent reverie.
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Mathematics commands all my respect, but I have no use for engines.
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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.
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Happiness, happiness ... the flavor is with you-with you alone, and you can make it as intoxicating as you please.
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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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Criticism, that fine flower of personal expression in the garden of letters.
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For a time I would feel I belonged still to a world of straightforward facts but the feeling would not last long. Something would turn up to scare it away.
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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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Everybody had to be thoroughly understood before being accepted.
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