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 respectable to have illusions - and safe - and profitable, and dull
They trespassed upon my thoughts. They were intruders whose knowledge of life was to me an irritating pretense, because I felt so sure they could not possibly know the things I knew. Their bearing, which was simply the bearing of commonplace individuals going about their business in the assurance of perfect safety, was offensive to me like the outrageous flauntings of folly in the face of a danger it is unable to comprehend. I had no particular desire to enlighten them, but I had some difficulty in restraining myself from laughing in their faces, so full of stupid importance.
It is respectable to have no illusions, and safe, and profitable and dull.
What all men are really after is some form, or perhaps only some formula, of peace.
Words, as is well known, are great foes of reality
I had ambition not only to go farther than any man had ever been before, but as far as it was possible for a man to go.
Remember, Razumov, that women, children, and revolutionists hate irony, which is the negation of all saving instincts, of all faith, of all devotion, of all action.
It is not Justice the servant of men, but accident, hazard, Fortune--the ally of patient Time--that holds an even and scrupulous balance.
The belief in a supernatural source of evil is not necessary: men alone are quite capable of every wickedness
As to honour you know it's a very fine mediaeval inheritance which women never got hold of. It wasn't theirs.
Don't talk to me of your Archimedes' lever. He was an absentminded person with a mathematical imagination. Mathematics commands all my respect, but I have no use for engines. Give me the right word and the right accent and I will move the world.
Between the conception and the creationbetween the emotion and the responseFalls the shadow
Between the conception and the creation between the emotion and the response Falls the shadow
The revolutionary spirit is mightily convenient in this: that it frees one from all scruples as regards ideas