You can t, in sound morals, condemn a man for taking care of his own integrity. It is his clear duty. And least of all can you condemn an artist pursuing, however humbly and imperfectly, a creative aim. In that interior world where his thought and his emotions go seeking for the experience of imagined adventures, there are no policemen, no law, no pressure of circumstance or dread of opinion to keep him within bounds. Who then is going to say Nay to his temptations if not his conscience?

Joseph Conrad

Categorized in : Men Adventure Integrity

The belief in a supernatural source of evil is not necessary; men alone are quite capable of every wickedness.

Joseph Conrad

evil-people inspirational men

Being a woman is a terribly difficult task, since it consists principally in dealing with men.

Joseph Conrad

strong-women hilarious funny

I don't like work... but I like what is in work - the chance to find yourself. Your own reality - for yourself, not for others - which no other man can ever know.

Joseph Conrad

being-yourself work inspirational

If you don't make mistakes, you don't make anything .

Joseph Conrad

making-mistakes ifs mistake

All roads are long which lead to one's heart's desire.

Joseph Conrad

desire heart long

My task, which I am trying to achieve is, by the power of the written word, to make you hear, to make you feel--it is, before all, to make you see.

Joseph Conrad

tasks writing trying

You must squeeze out of yourself every sensation, every thought, every image, - mercilessly, without reserve and without remorse: you must search the darkest corners of your heart, the most remote recesses of your brain, - you must search them for the image, for the glamour, for the right expression. And you must do it sincerely, at any cost: you must do it so that at the end of your day's work you should feel exhausted, emptied of every sensation and every thought, with a blank mind and an aching heart, with the notion that there is nothing, - nothing left in you.

Joseph Conrad

blank-mind expression heart

All ambitions are lawful except those which climb upward on the miseries or credulities of mankind.

Joseph Conrad

ambition literature feet

All creative art is magic, is evocation of the unseen in forms persuasive, enlightening, familiar and surprising.

Joseph Conrad

creativity creative art

Nowhere else than upon the sea do the days, weeks, and months fall away quicker into the past. They seem to be left astern as easily as the light air-bubbles in the swirls of the ship's wake.

Joseph Conrad

light past fall

Kisses are the remnants of paradise.

Joseph Conrad

remnants paradise kissing

It is not the clear-sighted who rule the world. Great achievements are accomplished in a blessed, warm fog.

Joseph Conrad

fog achievement blessed

You shall judge a man by his foes as well as by his friends.

Joseph Conrad

judging friendship men

One ship is very much like another and the sea is always the same. In the immutability of their surroundings the foreign shores, the foreign faces, the changing immensity of life, glide past, veiled not by a sense of mystery but by a slightly disdainful ignorance; for there is nothing mysterious to a seaman unless it be the sea itself, which is the mistress of his existence and as inscrutable as Destiny.

Joseph Conrad

destiny ignorance past

Any fool can carry on, but a wise man knows how to shorten sail in time.

Joseph Conrad

wise inspirational funny

There is no credulity so eager and blind as the credulity of covetousness, which, in its universal extent, measures the moral misery and the intellectual destitution of mankind.

Joseph Conrad

misery moral intellectual

Everything can be found at sea according to the spirit of your quest.

Joseph Conrad

quests spirit sea

The question is not how to get cured, but how to live.

Joseph Conrad

All a man can betray is his conscience.

Joseph Conrad

betrayal betrayed men

You know I hate, detest, and can't bear a lie, not because I am straighter than the rest of us, but simply because it appals me. There is a taint of death, a flavour of mortality in lies - which is exactly what I hate and detest in the world - what I want to forget.

Joseph Conrad

hate lying world