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
It is a maudlin and indecent verity that comes out through the strength of wine.
Everybody had to be thoroughly understood before being accepted.
They 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.
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.
A historian may be an artist too, and a novelist is a historian, the preserver, the keeper, the expounder, of human experience.
Even extreme grief may ultimately vent itself in violence--but more generally takes the form of apathy
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.
The good author is he who contemplates without marked joy or excessive sorrow the adventures of his soul amongst criticisms.
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.
Vanity plays lurid tricks with our memory, and the truth of every passion wants some pretence to make it live.