The sea - this truth must be confessed - has no generosity. No display of manly qualities - courage, hardihood, endurance, faithfulness - has ever been known to touch its irresponsible consciousness of power.
Joseph Conrad

The sea has never been friendly to man. At most it has been the accomplice of human restlessness.
Joseph Conrad

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.
Joseph Conrad

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

They talk of a man betraying his country, his friends, his sweetheart. There must be a moral bond first. All a man can betray is his conscience.
Joseph Conrad

This magnificent butterfly finds a little heap of dirt and sits still on it; but man will never on his heap of mud keep still.
Joseph Conrad

To a teacher of languages there comes a time when the world is but a place of many words and man appears a mere talking animal not much more wonderful than a parrot.
Joseph Conrad

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

Truth of a modest sort I can promise you, and also sincerity. That complete, praiseworthy sincerity which, while it delivers one into the hands of one's enemies, is as likely as not to embroil one with one's friends.
Joseph Conrad

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.
Joseph Conrad

Woe to the man whose heart has not learned while young to hope, to love - and to put its trust in life.
Joseph Conrad

Words, as is well known, are the great foes of reality.
Joseph Conrad

You can't, in sound morals, condemn a man for taking care of his own integrity. It is his clear duty.
Joseph Conrad

You shall judge a man by his foes as well as by his friends.
Joseph Conrad