The belief in a supernatural source of evil is not necessary; men alone are quite capable of every wickedness.
Joseph Conrad

Resignation, not mystic, not detached, but resignation open-eyed, conscious, and informed by love, is the only one of our feelings for which it is impossible to become a sham.
Joseph Conrad

Words, as is well known, are the great foes of reality.
Joseph Conrad

Each blade of grass has its spot on earth whence it draws its life, its strength; and so is man rooted to the land from which he draws his faith together with his life.
Joseph Conrad

A caricature is putting the face of a joke on the body of a truth.
Joseph Conrad

History repeats itself, but the special call of an art which has passed away is never reproduced. It is as utterly gone out of the world as the song of a destroyed wild bird.
Joseph Conrad

Going home must be like going to render an account.
Joseph Conrad

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.
Joseph Conrad

Being a woman is a terribly difficult task, since it consists principally in dealing with men.
Joseph Conrad

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.
Joseph Conrad

It is not the clear-sighted who rule the world. Great achievements are accomplished in a blessed, warm fog.
Joseph Conrad

To a teacher of languages there comes a time when the world is but a place of many words and man appears a mere talking animal not much more wonderful than a parrot.
Joseph Conrad

I don't like work... but I like what is in work - the chance to find yourself. Your own reality - for yourself, not for others - which no other man can ever know.
Joseph Conrad

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.
Joseph Conrad

You can't, in sound morals, condemn a man for taking care of his own integrity. It is his clear duty.
Joseph Conrad

There are men here and there to whom the whole of life is like an after-dinner hour with a cigar; easy, pleasant, empty, perhaps enlivened by some fable of strife to be forgotten - before the end is told - even if there happens to be any end to it.
Joseph Conrad

The sea has never been friendly to man. At most it has been the accomplice of human restlessness.
Joseph Conrad

In order to move others deeply we must deliberately allow ourselves to be carried away beyond the bounds of our normal sensibility.
Joseph Conrad

Who knows what true loneliness is - not the conventional word but the naked terror? To the lonely themselves it wears a mask. The most miserable outcast hugs some memory or some illusion.
Joseph Conrad

Perhaps life is just that... a dream and a fear.
Joseph Conrad

Woe to the man whose heart has not learned while young to hope, to love - and to put its trust in life.
Joseph Conrad

Gossip is what no one claims to like, but everybody enjoys.
Joseph Conrad

Some great men owe most of their greatness to the ability of detecting in those they destine for their tools the exact quality of strength that matters for their work.
Joseph Conrad

The last thing a woman will consent to discover in a man whom she loves, or on whom she simply depends, is want of courage.
Joseph Conrad

It is a maudlin and indecent verity that comes out through the strength of wine.
Joseph Conrad

All ambitions are lawful except those which climb upward on the miseries or credulities of mankind.
Joseph Conrad