Quotes by "Joseph Conrad"

Being a woman is a terribly difficult trade since it consists principally of dealings with men.

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

Action is consolatory. It is the enemy of thought and the friend of flattering illusions.

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

Facing it-always facing it-that's the way to get through. Face it!

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.

How does one kill fear, I wonder? How do you shoot a spectre through the heart, slash off its spectral head, take it by the spectral throat?

Who would care to question the ground of forgiveness or compassion?

To be busy with material affairs is the best preservative against reflection, fears, doubts ... all these things which stand in the way of achievement. I suppose a fellow proposing to cut his throat would experience a sort of relief while occupied in stropping his razor carefully.

Happiness, happiness ... the flavor is with you-with you alone, and you can make it as intoxicating as you please.

Caricature: putting the face of a joke upon the body of a truth.

Vanity plays lurid tricks with our memory.

I take it that what all men are really after is some form of, perhaps only some formula of, peace.

There is something haunting in the light of the moon; it has all the dispassionateness of a disembodied soul, and something of its inconceivable mystery.

No man ever understands quite his own artful dodges to escape from the grim shadow of self-knowledge.

I remember my youth and the feeling that will never come back any more - the feeling that I could last forever, outlast the sea, the earth, and all men.

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.

Like a running blaze on a plain, like a flash of lightning in the clouds. We live in the flicker.

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.

The question is not how to get cured, but how to live.