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 my belief no man ever understands quite his own artful dodges to escape from the grim shadow of self knowledge.
God is for men, and religion for women.
A historian may be an artist too, and a novelist is a historian, the preserver, the keeper, the expounder, of human experience.
To be a great autocrat you must be a great barbarian.
The good author is he who contemplates without marked joy or excessive sorrow the adventures of his soul amongst criticisms.
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.
Even extreme grief may ultimately vent itself in violence--but more generally takes the form of apathy
It is respectable to have no illusions, and safe, and profitable and dull.
Words, as is well known, are the great foes of reality.
All ambitions are lawful except those which climb upward on the miseries or credulities of mankind.
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.
It is a maudlin and indecent verity that comes out through the strength of wine.
He who wants to persuade should put his trust not in the right argument, but in the right word. The power of sound has always been greater than the power of sense.
Vanity plays lurid tricks with our memory, and the truth of every passion wants some pretence to make it live.