To cut oneself entirely from one's kind is impossible. To live in a desert one must be a saint.
The word 'ivory' rang in the air, was whispered, was sighed. You would think they were praying to it. A taint of imbecile rapacity blew through it all, like a whiff from some corpse.
The vision seemed to enter the house with me—the stretcher, the phantom-bearers, the wild crowd of obedient worshippers, the gloom of the forests, the glitter of the reach between the murky bends, the...
The sun was fierce, the land seemed to glisten and drip with steam.
The men we met walked past, slow, unsmiling, with downcast eyes, as if the melancholy of a over-burdened earth had weighted their feet, bowed their shoulders, borne down their glances
The man who says that he has no illusions has at least that one.
The last thing I want to tell you is this: in a real revolution—not a simple dynastic change or a mere reform of institutions—in a real revolution the best characters do not come to the front. A viole...
The earth for us is a place to live in, where we must put up with sights, with sounds, with smells, too, by Jove! - breathe dead hippo, so as to speak, and not be contaminated. And there, don't you se...
The belief in a super natural sources of evil is not necessary. Men alone are quite capable of every wickedness.
O youth! The strenght of it, the faith of it, the imagination of it! (...) I think of her with pleasure, with affection, with regret - as you would think of some one dead you have loved. I shall never...
Men act badly sometimes without being much worse than others,
It was one of those dewy, clear, starry nights, oppressing our spirit, crushing our pride, by the brilliant evidence of the awful loneliness, of the hopeless obscure insignificance of our globe lost i...
I think it had whispered to him things about himself which he did not know, things of which he had no conception till he took counsel with this great solitude - and the whisper had proved irresistibly...
I have been very happy—very fortunate—very proud,' she went on. 'Too fortunate. Too happy for a little while. And now I am unhappy for—for life.
I am afraid that if you want to go down into history you'll have to do something for it.
Everything belonged to him--but that was a trifle. The thing to know was what he belonged to, how many powers of darkness claimed him for their own.
Don't be too sure,' he continued. The other day I took up a man who hanged himself on the road. He was a Swede, too.' 'Hanged himself! Why, in God's name?' I cried. He kept on looking out watchfully....
Do you know how I would call the nature of the present economic conditions? I would call it cannibalistic. That's what it is! They are nourishing their greed on the quivering flesh and the warm blood...
Conrad placed on the title page an epigraph taken from Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene:Sleep after toyle, port after stormie seas, Ease after warre, death after life, does greatly please This also...
A writing may be lost; a lie may be written; but what the eye has seen is truth and remains in the mind!