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...
No eloquence could have been so withering to one's belief in mankind as his final burst of sincerity.
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 slipped the book into my pocket. I assure you to leave off reading was like tearing myself away from the shelter of an old and solid friendship.
I saw him open his mouth wide. . . as though he had wanted to swallow all the air, all the earth, all the men before him.
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.
I am afraid that if you want to go down into history you'll have to do something for it.
He was there below me, and, upon my word, to look at him was as edifying as seeing a dog in a parody of breeches and a featherhat, walking on his hind legs.
He has to live in the midst of the incomprehensible, which is also detestable.
He had entered by then the broad, human path of inconsistencies.
Fine fellows—cannibals—in their place.
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.
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...
Are not our lives too short for that full utterance which through all our stammerings is of course our only and abiding intention?
The conquest of the earth which mostly means the taking it away from those who have a different complexion or slightly flatter noses than ourselves is not a pretty thing when you look into it.
Who would care to question the ground of forgiveness or compassion?
Some great men owe most of their greatness to the ability of detecting in those they destine for their tools the exact quality of strength that matters for their work.
A man's real life is that accorded to him in the thoughts of other men by reason of respect or natural love.
Woe to the man whose heart has not learned while young to hope, to love - and to put its trust in life.