"This magnificent butterfly finds a little heap of dirt and sits still on it; but man will never on his heap of mud keep still."

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More quotes from: Joseph Conrad

• "A caricature is putting the face of a joke on the body of a truth. "
• "A man's most open actions have a secret side to them. "
• "Action is consolatory. It is the enemy of thought and the friend of flattering illusions. "
• "All ambitions are lawful except those which climb upward on the miseries or credulities of ..."
• "An artist is a man of action, whether he creates a personality, invents an expedient, ..."
• "Any work that aspires, however humbly, to the condition of art should carry its justification ..."
• "As in political so in literary action a man wins friends for himself mostly by ..."
• "As to honor - you know - it's a very fine mediaeval inheritance which women ..."
• "Being a woman is a terribly difficult task, since it consists principally in dealing with ..."
• "Don't talk to me of your Archimedes' lever. He was an absentminded person with a ..."
• "Each blade of grass has its spot on earth whence it draws its life, its ..."
• "Facing it, always facing it, that's the way to get through. Face it. "
• "For all that has been said of the love that certain natures (on shore) have ..."
• "Going home must be like going to render an account. "
• "Gossip is what no one claims to like, but everybody enjoys. "
• "Hang ideas! They are tramps, vagabonds, knocking at the back-door of your mind, each taking ..."
• "History repeats itself, but the special call of an art which has passed away is ..."
• "I don't like work... but I like what is in work - the chance to ..."
• "I had ambition not only to go farther than any man had ever been before, ..."
• "It is not the clear-sighted who rule the world. Great achievements are accomplished in a ..."
• "It is respectable to have no illusions, and safe, and profitable and dull. "

• "It is to be remarked that a good many people are born curiously unfitted for ..."
• "Nations it may be have fashioned their Governments, but the Governments have paid them back ..."
• "Only in men's imagination does every truth find an effective and undeniable existence. Imagination, not ..."
• "Resignation, not mystic, not detached, but resignation open-eyed, conscious, and informed by love, is the ..."
• "The belief in a supernatural source of evil is not necessary; men alone are quite ..."
• "The conquest of the earth, which mostly means the taking it away from those who ..."
• "The East Wind, an interloper in the dominions of Westerly Weather, is an impassive-faced tyrant ..."
• "The last thing a woman will consent to discover in a man whom she loves, ..."
• "The scrupulous and the just, the noble, humane, and devoted natures; the unselfish and the ..."
• "The sea - this truth must be confessed - has no generosity. No display of ..."
• "The sea has never been friendly to man. At most it has been the accomplice ..."
• "There are men here and there to whom the whole of life is like an ..."
• "There is nothing more enticing, disenchanting, and enslaving than the life at sea. "
• "They talk of a man betraying his country, his friends, his sweetheart. There must be ..."
• "To a teacher of languages there comes a time when the world is but a ..."
• "Truth of a modest sort I can promise you, and also sincerity. That complete, praiseworthy ..."
• "Who knows what true loneliness is - not the conventional word but the naked terror? ..."
• "Woe to the man whose heart has not learned while young to hope, to love ..."
• "Words, as is well known, are the great foes of reality. "
• "You can't, in sound morals, condemn a man for taking care of his own integrity. ..."

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