Joseph Conrad
Joseph Conrad
Joseph Conradwas a Polish-British writer regarded as one of the greatest novelists to write in the English language. He joined the British merchant marine in 1878, and was granted British nationality in 1886. Though he did not speak English fluently until he was in his twenties, he was a master prose stylist who brought a non-English sensibility into English literature. He wrote stories and novels, many with a nautical setting, that depict trials of the human spirit in the midst...
NationalityPolish
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth3 December 1857
CountryPoland
The revolutionary spirit is mightily convenient in this: that it frees one from all scruples as regards ideas
You shall judge of a man by his foes as well as by his friends.
A work that aspires, however humbly, to the condition of art should carry its justification in every line.
A word carries far - very far - deals destruction through time as the bullets go flying through space.
All ambitions are lawful except those which climb upward upon the miseries and credulities of mankind
This could have occurred nowhere but in England, where men and sea interpenetrate, so to speak.
I had ambition not only to go farther than any man had ever been before, but as far as it was possible for a man to go.
In the immutability of their surroundings the foreign shores, the foreign faces, the changing immensity of life, glide past, veiled not by a sense of mystery but by a slightly disdainful ignorance; for there is nothing mysterious to a seaman unless it be the sea itself, which is the mistress of his existence and as inscrutable as Destiny.
I remember my youth and the feeling that will never come back any more --the feeling that I could last for ever, outlast the sea, the earth, and all men; the deceitful feeling that lures us on to joys, to perils, to love, to vain effort --to death; the triumphant conviction of strength, the heat of life in the handful of dust, the glow in the heart that with every year grows dim, grows cold, grows small, and expires --and expires, too soon, too soon --before life itself.
His eyes were naturally heavy; he had an air of having wallowed, fully dressed, all day on an unmade bed.
In plucking the fruit of memory one runs the risk of spoiling its bloom
I don't like work no man does but I like what is in the work the chance to find yourself
It is respectable to have illusions - and safe - and profitable, and dull
The belief in a supernatural source of evil is not necessary: men alone are quite capable of every wickedness