Joseph Conrad

Hang ideas! They are tramps, vagabonds, knocking at the back-door of your mind, each taking a little of your substance, each carrying away some crumb of that belief in a few simple notions you must cling to if you want to live decently and would like to die easy!.

Vanity plays lurid tricks with our memory.

Going home must be like going to render an account.

It was a great peace, as if the earth had been one grave, and for a time I stood there thinking mostly of the living who, buried in remote places out of the knowledge of mankind, still are fated to share in its tragic or grotesque miseries. In its noble struggles too — who knows? The human heart is vast enough to contain all the world. It is valiant enough to bear the burden, but where is the courage that would cast it off?

She said we lied. Poor soul! Well — let's leave it to Chance, whose ally is Time, that cannot be hurried, and whose enemy is Death, that will not wait.

They wanted facts. Facts! They demanded facts from him, as if facts could explain anything.

There is nothing more enticing, disenchanting, and enslaving than the life at sea.

There are men here and there to whom the whole of life is like an after-dinner hour with a cigar; easy, pleasant, empty, perhaps enlivened by some fable of strife to be forgotten — before the end is told — even if there happens to be any end to it.

Each blade of grass has its spot on earth whence it draws its life, its strength; and so is man rooted to the land from which he draws his faith together with his life.

I am a great foe of favoritism in public life, in private life, and even in the delicate relationship of an author to his works.

Who could tell what forms, what visions, what faces, what forgiveness he could see in the glow of the west!

A man that is born falls into a dream like a man who falls into the sea. If he tries to climb out into the air as inexperienced people endeavour to do, he drowns.