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
A historian may be an artist too, and a novelist is a historian, the preserver, the keeper, the expounder, of human experience.
It is to be remarked that a good many people are born curiously unfitted for the fate waiting them on this earth.
Your strength is just an accident owed to the weakness of others.
What makes mankind tragic is not that they are the victims of nature, it is that they are conscious of it.
All ambitions are lawful except those which climb upward on the miseries or credulities of mankind.
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.
It’s extraordinary how we go through life with eyes half shut, with dull ears, with dormant thoughts. Perhaps it’s just as well; and it may be that it is this very dullness that makes life to the incalculable majority so supportable and so welcome.
I would not unduly praise the virtue of restraint. It is often merely temperamental. But it is not always a sign of coldness. It may be pride. There can be nothing more humiliating than to see the shaft of one's emotion miss the mark of either laughter or tears. Nothing more humiliating! And this for the reason that should the mark be missed, should the open display of emotion fail to move, then it must perish unavoidably in disgust or contempt.
Words, as is well known, are the great foes of reality.
It is respectable to have no illusions, and safe, and profitable and dull.
The last thing a woman will consent to in a man whom she loves, or on whom she simply depends, is want of courage.
We live as we dream--alone....
The artist in his calling of interpreter creates because he must. He is so much of a voice that, for him, silence is like death
The ethical view of the universe involves us in so many cruel and absurd contradictions that I have come to suspect that the aim of creation cannot be ethical at all.