Joseph Conrad Quotes on Life

12 quotes

  1. Facing it - always facing it - that's the way to get through.

  2. It is to be remarked that a good many people are born curiously unfitted for the fate awaiting them on this earth.

  3. I can't tell if a straw ever saved a drowning man, but I know that a mere glance is enough to make despair pause. For in truth we who are creatures of impulse are not creatures of despair.

  4. Every age is fed on illusions, lest men should renounce life early and the human race come to an end.

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

  6. Reality, as usual, beats fiction out of sight.

  7. For the great mass of mankind the only saving grace that is needed is steady fidelity to what is nearest to hand and heart in the short moment of each human effort.

  8. I remember my youth and the feeling that will never come back any more - the feeling that I could last for ever, outlast the sea, the earth, and all men; the deceitful feeling that lures us on to joys, to perils, to love, to vain effort - to death; the triumphant conviction of strength, the heat of life in the handful of dust, the glow in the heart that with every year grows dim, grows cold, grows small, and expires - and expires, too soon - too soon before life itself.

  9. Only a moment; a moment of strength, of romance, of glamour - of youth!... A flick of sunshine upon a strange shore, the time to remember, the time for a sigh, and - goodbye! - Night - Goodbye!

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

  11. I take it that what all men are really after is some form or perhaps only some formula of peace.

  12. Perhaps life is just that... a dream and a fear.

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