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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 109c399 | By all that's wonderful, it is the sea, I believe, the sea itself -- or is it youth alone? Who can tell? But you here -- you all had something out of life: money, love -- whatever one gets on shore -- and, tell me, wasn't that the best time, that time when we were young at sea; young and had nothing, on the sea that gives nothing, except hard knocks -- and sometimes a chance to feel your strength -- that only -- what you all regret?" And we.. | Joseph Conrad | ||
| 727d7be | Dark human shapes could be made out in the distance, flitting indistinctly against the gloomy border of the forest, | Joseph Conrad | ||
| 6ab9c95 | And yet I have known the sea too long to believe in its respect for decency. An elemental force is ruthlessly frank | Joseph Conrad | ||
| fe06872 | They (Romans) were conquerors, and for that you want only brute force - nothing to boast of, when you have it, since your strength is just an accident arising from the weakness of others. They grabbed what they could get for the sake of what was to be got. It was just robbery with violence, aggravated murder on a great scale, and men going at it blind - as is very proper for those who tackle a darkness. The conquest of the earth which mostl.. | Joseph Conrad | ||
| 7108c06 | The way of even the most justifiable revolution is prepared by personal impulses disguised into creeds. The Professor's indignation found in itself a final cause that absolued him from the sin of turning to destruction as the agent of his ambition. To destroy public faith in legality was the imperfect formula of his pedantic fanaticism; but the subconscious conviction that the framework of an established social order cannot be effectually s.. | Joseph Conrad | ||
| 98b4059 | True wisdom, which is not certain of anything in this world of contradictions, would have prevented him from attaining his present position. It would have alarmed his superiors, and done away with his chances of promotion. | Joseph Conrad | ||
| 5c3c993 | Thieving was not a sheer absurdity. It was a form of human industry, perverse indeed, but still an industry exercised in an industrious world; it was work undertaken for the same reason as the work in potteries, in coal mines, in fields, in tool-grinding shops. It was labour, whose practical difference from the other forms of labour consisted in the nature of its risk, which did not lie in ankylosis, or lead poisoning, or fire-damp, or grit.. | Joseph Conrad | ||
| 6451868 | In a few moments all the stars came out above the intense blackness of the earth and the great lagoon gleaming suddenly with reflected lights resembled an oval patch of night sky flung down into the hopeless and abysmal night of the wilderness. | night-sky nature-s-beauty | Joseph Conrad | |
| 4397dc5 | the men, the women, the children; the old with the young, the decrepit with the lusty--all equal before sleep, death's brother. | Joseph Conrad | ||
| 0afb768 | It was like a weary pilgrimage amongst hints for nightmares. | Joseph Conrad | ||
| cee5506 | He steered for me - I had to look after him, I worried about his deficiencies, and thus a subtle bond had been created, of which I only became aware of when it was suddenly broken. And the intimate profundity of that look he gave me when he received his hurt remains to this day in my memory - like a claim of distant kinship affirmed in a supreme moment. | Joseph Conrad | ||
| 43ac53f | The sun was fierce, the land seemed to glisten and drip with steam. | Joseph Conrad | ||
| bad97b2 | Any work aspiring to be art however humble should carry its justification in every line. | Joseph Conrad | ||
| 191e002 | the artist descends within himself, and in that lonely region of stress and strife, if he be deserving and fortunate, he finds the terms of his appeal. His appeal is made to our less obvious capacities: to that part of our nature which, because of the warlike conditions of existence, is necessarily kept out of sight within the more resisting and hard qualities ... His appeal is less loud, more profound, less distinct, more stirring--and soo.. | Joseph Conrad | ||
| fc83796 | And at last, in its curved and imperceptible fall, the sun sank low, and from glowing white changed to a dull red without rays and without heat, as if about to go out suddenly, stricken to death by the touch of that gloom brooding over a crowd of men. | Joseph Conrad | ||
| d48c2ae | oh youth! The strength of it, the faith of it, the imagination of it! | Joseph Conrad | ||
| bc8a730 | No eloquence could have been so withering to one's belief in mankind as his final burst of sincerity. | Joseph Conrad | ||
| 348c2f0 | but in the great demoralization of the land he kept up his appearance. That's backbone. | Joseph Conrad | ||
| e128790 | doomed to be the recipient of confidences... | Joseph Conrad | ||
| 92d79a0 | A slight clinking behind me made me turn my head. Six black men advanced in a file, toiling up the path. They walked erect and slow, balancing small baskets full of earth on their heads, and the clink kept time with their footsteps. Black rags were wound round their loins, and the short ends behind wagged to and fro like tails. I could see every rib, the joints of their limbs were like knots in a rope; each had an iron collar on his neck, a.. | Joseph Conrad | ||
| 4a3f58b | as i emerge on deck the ordered arrangement of the stars meets my eye, unclouded, infinitely wearisome. There they are: stars, sun, sea, light, darkness, space, great waters; the formidable Work of the Seven Days, into which mankind seems to have blundered unbidden. Or else decoyed. | Joseph Conrad | ||
| ab75f0c | Had he been informed by an indisputable authority that the end of the world was to be finally accomplished by a catastrophic disturbance of the atmosphere, he would have assimilated the information under the simple idea of dirty weather, and no other, because he had no experience of cataclysms, and belief does not necessarily imply comprehension. | Joseph Conrad | ||
| c1294df | The edge of a colossal jungle, so dark-green as to be almost black, fringed with white surf, ran straight, like a ruled line, far, far, away along blue sea whose glitter was blurred by a creeping mist. | Joseph Conrad | ||
| 94d18f8 | He had entered by then the broad, human path of inconsistencies. | Joseph Conrad | ||
| 6a864ae | The men we met walked past, slow, unsmiling, with downcast eyes, as if the melancholy of a over-burdened earth had weighted their feet, bowed their shoulders, borne down their glances | Joseph Conrad | ||
| 4e58fef | The islands are very quiet. One sees them lying about, clothed in their dark garments of leaves, in a great hush of silver and azure, where the sea without murmurs meets the sky in a ring of magic stillness. | Joseph Conrad | ||
| 23f1575 | In life, you see, there is not much choice. You have either to rot or to burn. And there is not one of us, painted or unpainted, that would not rather burn than rot. | Joseph Conrad | ||
| aaa9406 | Napoleon I., whose career had the quality of a duel against the whole of Europe, disliked duelling between the officers of his army. The great military emperor was not a washbuckler, and had little respect for tradition. Nevertheless, a story of duelling, which became a legend in the army, runs through the epic of imperial wars. To the surprise and admiration of their fellows, two officers, like insane artists trying to gild refined gold or.. | napoleon | Joseph Conrad | |
| d0bdae8 | And from right to left along the lighted shore moved a wild and gorgeous apparition of a woman. 'She walked with measured steps, draped in striped and fringed cloths, treading the earth proudly, with a slight jingle and flash of barbarous ornaments. She carried her head high; her hair was done in the shape of a helmet; she had brass leggings to the knee, brass wire gauntlets to the elbow, a crimson spot on her tawny cheek, innumerable nec.. | Joseph Conrad | ||
| dcbfe84 | Since I had peeped over the edge myself, I understand better the meaning of his stare, that could not see the flame of the candle, but was wide enough to embrace the whole universe, piercing enough to penetrate all the hearts that beat in the darkness. He had summed it up - he had judged. "The horror!" | Joseph Conrad | ||
| fbcbee5 | Everybody had to be thoroughly understood before being accepted. | Joseph Conrad | ||
| ff61bba | It was a dark story. | marriage dark death short kidnapping pirate theft ominous | Joseph Conrad | |
| f11f30d | She had said he had been driven away from her by a dream,--and there was no answer one could make her--there seemed to be no forgiveness for such a transgression. And yet is not mankind itself, pushing on its blind way, driven by a dream of its greatness and its power upon the dark paths of excessive cruelty and of excessive devotion. And what is the pursuit of truth, after all? | mankind humanity fear truth ambitious-minds ambitious-people driven idlesness self-motivated haunted human-condition grace self-loathing self-hate fall fire pride | Joseph Conrad | |
| 667461c | All this happened in much less time than it takes to tell, since I am trying to interpret for you into slow speech the instantaneous effect of visual impressions. | writer love overly-descriptive retell retold show-and-tell boring exposition witness explanation testimony why retelling description creativity | Joseph Conrad | |
| ad3317c | And because you not always can keep your eyes shut there comes the real trouble--the heart pain--the world pain. I tell you, my friend, it is not good for you to find you cannot make your dream come true, for the reason that you not strong enough are, or not clever enough. . . . Ja! . . . And all the time you are such a fine fellow too! Wie? Was? Gott im Himmel! How can that be? Ha! ha! ha!" 'The shadow prowling amongst the graves of butt.. | broken-dreams broken-spirit heart-pain lost-souls heartache | Joseph Conrad | |
| 5ad13e2 | The fault of this country is the want of measure in political life. Flat acquiescence in illegality, followed by sanguinary reaction--that, senores, is not the way to a stable and prosperous future. | Joseph Conrad | ||
| 3b35fde | And there's another thing: a man should stand up to his bad luck, to his mistakes, to his conscience and all that sort of thing. Why--what else would you have to fight against. | Joseph Conrad | ||
| f0efa10 | They believed their words. Everybody shows a respectful deference to certain sounds that he and his fellows can make. But about feelings people really know nothing. We talk with indignation or enthusiasm; we talk about oppression, cruelty, crime, devotion, self-sacrifice, virtue, and we know nothing real beyond the words. Nobody knows what suffering or sacrifice mean- except, perhaps the victims of the mysterious purpose of these illusions. | Joseph Conrad | ||
| 43638bf | He was little more than a voice. And I heard-him-it-this voice-other voices-all of them were so little more than voices-and the memory of that time itself lingers around me, impalpable, like a dying vibration of one immense jabber, silly, atrocious, sordid, savage, or simply mean, without any kind of sense. | Joseph Conrad | ||
| d3399a6 | No fear can stand up to hunger, no patience can wear it out, disgust simply does not exist where hunger is; and as to superstition, beliefs, and what you may call principles, they are less than chaff in a breeze. | writing | Joseph Conrad | |
| 86affc1 | No fear can stand up to hunger, no patience can wear it out, disgust simply does not exist where the hunger is; and as to superstition, beliefs and what you may call principles, they are less than chaff in the breeze. Don't you know the devilry of lingering starvation, its exasperating torment, its black thoughts, its sombre and brooding ferocity? Well, i do. It takes a man all his inborn strength to fight hunger properly. It's really easie.. | starvation | Joseph Conrad | |
| e4d38f6 | The beauty of the loved woman exists in the beauties of Nature. | Joseph Conrad | ||
| 84ae607 | I let him run on, this papier-mache Mephistopheles, and it seemed to me that if I tried I could poke my forefinger through him, and would find nothing inside but a little loose dirt, maybe. | Joseph Conrad | ||
| 268a147 | I found myself back in the sepulchral city resenting the sight of people hurrying through the streets to filch a little money from each other, to devour their infamous cookery, to gulp their unwholesome beer, to dream their insignificant and silly dreams. They trespassed upon my thoughts. They were intruders whose knowledge of life was to me an irritating pretence, because I felt so sure they could not possibly know the things I knew. Their.. | near-death-experience life-changing | Joseph Conrad |