1857-1924, Polish-born British Novelist
A caricature is putting the face of a joke on the body of a truth.
Joseph Conrad – [Humor]
A man is a worker. If he is not that he is nothing.
Joseph Conrad – [Work]
A man that is born falls into a dream like a man who falls into the sea. If he tries to climb out into the air as inexperienced people endeavor to do, he drowns.
Joseph Conrad – [Dreams]
A man's most open actions have a secret side to them.
Joseph Conrad – [Secrets]
A man's real life is that accorded to him in the thoughts of other men by reason of respect or natural love.
Joseph Conrad – [People, Other]
A noble man compares and estimates himself by an idea which is higher than himself; and a mean man, by one lower than himself. The one produces aspiration; the other ambition, which is the way in which a vulgar man aspires.
Joseph Conrad – [Ambition]
A word carries far — very far — deals destruction through time as the bullets go flying through space.
Joseph Conrad – [Words]
An artist is a man of action, whether he creates a personality, invents an expedient, or finds the issue of a complicated situation.
Joseph Conrad – [Arts and Artists]
Any work that aspires, however humbly, to the condition of art should carry its justification in every line.
Joseph Conrad – [Arts and Artists]
As to honor — you know — it's a very fine mediaeval inheritance which women never got hold of. It wasn't theirs.
Joseph Conrad – [Honor]
Criticism, that fine flower of personal expression in the garden of letters.
Joseph Conrad – [Critics and Criticism]
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. From laughter and tears the descent is easy to sniveling and giggles.
Joseph Conrad – [Exaggeration]
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 – [Land]
Facing it, always facing it, that's the way to get through. Face it.
Joseph Conrad – [Courage]
Going home must be like going to render an account.
Joseph Conrad – [Home]
Gossip is what no one claims to like, but everybody enjoys.
Joseph Conrad – [Gossip]
Hang ideas! They are tramps, vagabonds, knocking at the back-door of your mind, each taking a little of your substance, each carrying away some crumb of that belief in a few simple notions you must cling to if you want to live decently and would like to die easy!
Joseph Conrad – [Ideas]
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 – [Persuasion]
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 – [Crafts]
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?
Joseph Conrad – [Fear]