Joseph Conrad

Truth of a modest sort I can promise you, and also sincerity. That complete, praiseworthy sincerity which, while it delivers one into the hands of one's enemies, is as likely as not to embroil one with one's friends.

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

The sea - this truth must be confessed - has no generosity. No display of manly qualities - courage, hardihood, endurance, faithfulness - has ever been known to touch its irresponsible consciousness of power.

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.

As to honor - you know - it's a very fine mediaeval inheritance which women never got hold of. It wasn't theirs.

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

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

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.

This magnificent butterfly finds a little heap of dirt and sits still on it but man will never on his heap of mud keep still.

A word carries far, very far, deals destruction through time as the bullets go flying through space.

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

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

this grimy fragment of another world, the forerunner of change, of conquest, of trade, of massacres, of blessings....the merry dance of death and trade goes on

Vanity plays lurid tricks with our memory, and the truth of every passion wants some pretence to make it live.

He is romantic__omantic,_ he repeated. __nd that is very bad__ery bad. . . . Very good, too,_ he added. __ut is he?_ I queried.___ewiss,_ he said, and stood still holding up the candelabrum, but without looking at me. __vident! What is it that by inward pain makes him know himself? What is it that for you and me makes him__xist?___t that moment it was difficult to believe in Jim__ existence__tarting from a country parsonage, blurred by crowds of men as by clouds of dust, silenced by the clashing claims of life and death in a material world__ut his imperishable reality came to me with a convincing, with an irresistible force! I saw it vividly, as though in our progress through the lofty silent rooms amongst fleeting gleams of light and the sudden revelations of human figures stealing with flickering flames within unfathomable and pellucid depths, we had approached nearer to absolute Truth, which, like Beauty itself, floats elusive, obscure, half submerged, in the silent still waters of mystery. __erhaps he is,_ I admitted with a slight laugh, whose unexpectedly loud reverberation made me lower my voice directly; __ut I am sure you are._ With his head dropping on his breast and the light held high he began to walk again. __ell__ exist, too,_ he said.

It was a wonderful experience. She mistrusted his very slumbers--and she seemed to think I could tell her why! Thus a poor mortal seduced by the charm of an apparition might have tried to wring from another ghost the tremendous secret of the claim the other world holds over a disembodied soul astray amongst the passions of this earth. The very ground on which I stood seemed to melt under my feet. And it was so simple too; but if the spirits evoked by our fears and our unrest have ever to vouch for each other's constancy before the forlorn magicians that we are, then I--I alone of us dwellers in the flesh--have shuddered in the hopeless chill of such a task.

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.

The sea - the truth must be confessed - has no generosity. No display of manly qualities - courage hardihood endurance faithfulness - has ever been known to touch its irresponsible consciousness of power.