Conrad placed on the title page an epigraph taken from Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene: "Sleep after toyle, port after stormie seas,… — Joseph Conrad Copy Share Image
...for there is nothing mysterious to a seaman unless it be the sea itself, which is the mistress of his existence... — Joseph Conrad Copy Share Image
“Like a running blaze on a plain, like a flash of lightning in the clouds. We live in the flicker.” — Joseph Conrad Copy Share Image
One ship is very much like another and the sea is always the same. In the immutability of their surroundings the foreign… — Joseph Conrad Copy Share Image
It’s extraordinary how we go through life with eyes half shut, with dull ears, with dormant thoughts. Perhaps it’s just as well;… — Joseph Conrad Copy Share Image
“To snatch in a moment of courage, from the remorseless rush of time, a passing phase of life, is only the beginning… — Joseph Conrad Copy Share Image
“He was a seaman, but he was a wanderer, too, while most seamen lead, if one may so express it, a sedentary… — Joseph Conrad Copy Share Image
“As is often the case with lawless natures, Ricardo’s faith in any given individual was of a simple, unquestioning character. For man… — Joseph Conrad Copy Share Image
“They will be bound to make some arrests, he thought, with something resembling virtuous indignation, for the even tenor of his revolutionary… — Joseph Conrad Copy Share Image
Joy and sorrow in this world pass into each other, mingling their forms and their murmurs in the twilight of life as… — Joseph Conrad Copy Share Image
“The world of the living contains enough marvels and mysteries..acting upon our emotions and intelligence in ways so inexplicable that it would… — Joseph Conrad Copy Share Image
You can't breathe dead hippo waking, sleeping, and eating, and at the same time keep your precarious grip on existence. — Joseph Conrad Copy Share Image
There is nothing more enticing, disenchanting, and enslaving than the life at sea. — Joseph Conrad Copy Share Image
The humblest craft that floats makes its appeal to a seaman by the faithfulness of her life. — Joseph Conrad Copy Share Image
Woe to the man whose heart has not learned while young to hope, to love - and to put its trust in… — Joseph Conrad Copy Share Image
We live as we dream - alone. While the dream disappears, the life continues painfully. — Joseph Conrad Copy Share Image
“the artist descends within himself, and in that lonely region of stress and strife, if he be deserving and fortunate, he finds… — Joseph Conrad Copy Share Image
I couldn't have felt more of lonely desolation somehow, had I been robbed of a belief or had missed my destiny in… — Joseph Conrad Copy Share Image
Life knows us not and we do not know life—-we don’t know even our own thoughts. Half the words we use have… — Joseph Conrad Copy Share Image
“All idealisation makes life poorer. To beautify it is to take away its character of complexity — it is to destroy it.” — Joseph Conrad Copy Share Image
“Ah! These commercial interests -- spoiling the finest life under the sun. Why must the sea be used for trade -- and… — Joseph Conrad Copy Share Image
“a stone image shed a miraculous tear of compassion over the incertitudes of life and death....” — Joseph Conrad Copy Share Image
For every age is fed on illusions, lest men should renounce life early, and the human race come to an end. — Joseph Conrad Copy Share Image
We owe much to the fruitful meditation of our sages, but a sane view of life is, after all, elaborated mainly in… — Joseph Conrad Copy Share Image
“Hunters for gold or pursuers of fame, they all had gone out on that stream, bearing the sword, and often the torch, messengers of… — Joseph Conrad Copy Share Image
The good author is he who contemplates without marked joy or excessive sorrow the adventures of his soul amongst criticisms. — Joseph Conrad Copy Share Image
“A fool, what with sheer fright and fine sentiments, is always safe.” — Joseph Conrad Copy Share Image
“The mind of man is capable of anything-because everything is in it, all the past as well as all the future. What was there… — Joseph Conrad Copy Share Image
Few men realize that their life, the very essence of their character, their capabilities and their audacities, are only the expression of their belief… — Joseph Conrad Copy Share Image
“Perhaps on some quiet night the tremor of far-off drums, sinking, swelling, a tremor vast, faint; a sound weird, appealing, suggestive and wild -… — Joseph Conrad Copy Share Image
“All that mysterious life of the wilderness that stirs in the forest, in the jungles, in the hearts of wild men.” — Joseph Conrad Copy Share Image
“Thieving was not a sheer absurdity. It was a form of human industry, perverse indeed, but still an industry exercised in an industrious world;… — Joseph Conrad Copy Share Image
