Joseph Conrad

The mind of man is capable of anything - because everything is in it all the past as well as all the future.

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

Felicity felicity ... is quaffed out of a golden cup ... the flavour is with you alone and you can make it as intoxicating as you please.

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

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

To have his path made clear for him is the aspiration of every human being in our beclouded and tempestuous existence.

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.

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. That _ and no more, and it is everything. If I succeed, you shall find there according to your deserts: encouragement, consolation, fear, charm _ all you demand; and, perhaps, also that glimpse of truth for which you have forgotten to ask.

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

Vanity plays lurid tricks with our memory.

Who knows what true loneliness is - not the conventional word but the naked terror? To the lonely themselves it wears a mask. The most miserable outcast hugs some memory or some illusion.

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.

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

Writing in English is like throwing mud at a wall.

It is when we try to grapple with another man's intimate need that we perceive how incomprehensible wavering and misty are the beings that share with us the sight of the stars and the warmth of the sun.

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

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.

As in political so in literary action a man wins friends for himself mostly by the passion of his prejudices.