Joseph Conrad Love Quotes and Sayings

Joseph Conrad Love Quotes and Sayings

#1 Chapter IV, Victory [S]

1. He remembered that she was pretty, and, more, that she had a special grace in the intimacy of life. She had the secret of individuality which excites—and escapes.

#2 Chapter V, Victory [S]

2. 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.

#3 Chapter XIV, Victory [S]

3. …woe to the man whose heart has not learned while young to hope, to love—and to put its trust in life!

#4 Under Western Eyes [S]

4. A man’s real life is that accorded to him in the thoughts of other men by reason of respect or natural love.

#5 CHAPTER XXI, Lord Jim [S]

5. There is never time to say our last word — the last word of our love, of our desire, faith, remorse, submission, revolt.

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Excerpt from Wikipedia: Joseph Conrad (born Józef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski; 3 December 1857 – 3 August 1924) was a Polish-born British novelist, who in 1886 became a British subject. He is regarded as one of the greatest novelists in English though he did not speak the language fluently until he was in his twenties (and then always with a marked Polish accent). He wrote stories and novels, predominantly with a nautical setting, that depict trials of the human spirit by the demands of duty and honor.
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Sayings by Joseph Conrad

#1 Letter to R. B. Cunninghame Graham, 31 January 1898, The Collected Letters of Joseph Conrad [S]

1. What makes mankind tragic is not that they are the victims of nature, it is that they are conscious of it. To be part of the animal kingdom under the conditions of this earth is very well — but as soon as you know of your slavery the pain, the anger, the strife — the tragedy begins. We can’t return to nature, since we can’t change our place in it.

#2 Letter to Edward Garnett, 29 March 1898, The Collected Letters of Joseph Conrad [S]

2. Since then I’ve been better but have been unable to write. I sit down religiously every morning, I sit down for eight hours every day—and the sitting down is all. In the course of that working day of 8 hours I write 3 sentences which I erase before leaving the table in despair. There’s not a single word to send you.

#3 Under Western Eyes [S]

3. 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.

#4 Under Western Eyes [S]

4. Only the belief in a supernatural source of evil is not necessary; men alone are quite capable of every wickedness.

#5 Under Western Eyes [S]

5. Being myself a quiet individual, I take it that what all men are really after is some form, or perhaps only some formula, of peace.

#6 Heart of Darkness [S]

6. I don’t like work—no man does—but I like what is in the work,—the chance to find yourself. Your own reality—for yourself, not for others—what no other man can ever know. They can only see the mere show, and never can tell what it really means.

#7 Heart of Darkness [S]

7. We live, as we dream—alone. . . .

#8 Heart of Darkness [S]

8. 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 appalls me. There is a taint of death, a flavor of mortality in lies,—which is exactly what I hate and detest in the world—what I want to forget.

#9 Heart of Darkness [S]

9. We live in the flicker—may it last as long as the old earth keeps rolling!

#10 Heart of Darkness [S]

10. I always went my own road and on my own legs where I had a mind to go. I wouldn’t have believed it of myself; but, then— you see—I felt somehow I must get there by hook or by crook.

#11 An Outcast of the Islands [S]

11. It’s only those who do nothing that make no mistakes, I suppose.

#12 Preface, The Nigger of the Narcissus [S]

12. My task which I am trying to achieve is, by the power of the written word to make you hear, to make you feel—it is, before all, to make you see.

#13 CHAPTER XIII, Lord Jim [S]

13. It’s extraordinary how we go through life with eyes half shut, with dull ears, with dormant thoughts. Perhaps it’s just as well; and it may be that it is this very dullness that makes life to the incalculable majority so supportable and so welcome.

#14 CHAPTER XIV, Lord Jim [S]

14. You must see things exactly as they are—if you don’t, you may just as well give in at once. You will never do anything in this world. Look at me. I made it a practice never to take anything to heart.

#15 CHAPTER XV, Lord Jim [S]

15. And a word carries far— very far — deals destruction through time as the bullets go flying through space.

#16 CHAPTER XX, Lord Jim [S]

16. …the question is not how to get cured, but how to live.

#17 CHAPTER XX, Lord Jim [S]

17. Look! The beauty—but that is nothing—look at the accuracy, the harmony.

#18 CHAPTER XX, Lord Jim [S]

18. 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.

#19 CHAPTER XXXIV, Lord Jim [S]

19. The human heart is vast enough to contain all the world.

#20 A Familiar Preface, A Personal Record [S]

20. One’s literary life must turn frequently for sustenance to memories and seek discourse with the shades, unless one has made up one’s mind to write only in order to reprove mankind for what it is, or praise it for what it is not, or—generally—to teach it how to behave.

#21 A Familiar Preface, A Personal Record [S]

21. In order to move others deeply we must deliberately allow ourselves to be carried away beyond the bounds of our normal sensibility—innocently enough, perhaps, and of necessity, like an actor who raises his voice on the stage above the pitch of natural conversation—but still we have to do that. And surely this is no great sin. But the 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.

#22 A Familiar Preface, A Personal Record [S]

22. I think that all ambitions are lawful except those which climb upward on the miseries or credulities of mankind.

#23 Typhoon [S]

23. Facing it—always facing it—that’s the way to get through.
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Unsourced Quotes by Joseph Conrad

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

2. I had ambition not only to go farther than any man had ever been before, but as far as it was possible for a man to go.

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