Joseph Conrad Quotes

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

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.

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

Vanity plays lurid tricks with our memory.

The conquest of the earth which mostly means the taking it away from those who have a different complexion or slightly flatter noses than ourselves is not a pretty thing when you look into it.

Well, you know, that was the worst of it - this suspicion of not being inhuman. It would come slowly to one. They howled and leaped, and spun, and made horrid faces; but what thrilled you was just the thought of their humanity - like yours - the thought of your remote kinship with this wild and passionate uproar.

This could have occurred nowhere but in England, where men and sea interpenetrate, so to speak—the sea entering into the life of most men, and the men knowing something or everything about the sea, in the way of amusement, of travel, or of bread-winning.

And yet I have known the sea too long to believe in its respect for decency. An elemental force is ruthlessly frank