Zitat des Tages von Joseph Conrad:
As to honor - you know - it's a very fine mediaeval inheritance which women never got hold of. It wasn't theirs.
He who wants to persuade should put his trust not in the right argument, but in the right word. The power of sound has always been greater than the power of sense.
Woe to the man whose heart has not learned while young to hope, to love - and to put its trust in life.
A caricature is putting the face of a joke on the body of a truth.
Who knows what true loneliness is - not the conventional word but the naked terror? To the lonely themselves it wears a mask. The most miserable outcast hugs some memory or some illusion.
In order to move others deeply we must deliberately allow ourselves to be carried away beyond the bounds of our normal sensibility.
To a teacher of languages there comes a time when the world is but a place of many words and man appears a mere talking animal not much more wonderful than a parrot.
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.
Facing it, always facing it, that's the way to get through. Face it.
Resignation, not mystic, not detached, but resignation open-eyed, conscious, and informed by love, is the only one of our feelings for which it is impossible to become a sham.
Gossip is what no one claims to like, but everybody enjoys.
As in political so in literary action a man wins friends for himself mostly by the passion of his prejudices and the consistent narrowness of his outlook.
An artist is a man of action, whether he creates a personality, invents an expedient, or finds the issue of a complicated situation.
Action is consolatory. It is the enemy of thought and the friend of flattering illusions.
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.
All ambitions are lawful except those which climb upward on the miseries or credulities of mankind.
Criticism, that fine flower of personal expression in the garden of letters.
A man that is born falls into a dream like a man who falls into the sea. If he tries to climb out into the air as inexperienced people endeavor to do, he drowns.
Nations it may be have fashioned their Governments, but the Governments have paid them back in the same coin.
Any work that aspires, however humbly, to the condition of art should carry its justification in every line.
Words, as is well known, are the great foes of reality.
They talk of a man betraying his country, his friends, his sweetheart. There must be a moral bond first. All a man can betray is his conscience.
Truth of a modest sort I can promise you, and also sincerity. That complete, praiseworthy sincerity which, while it delivers one into the hands of one's enemies, is as likely as not to embroil one with one's friends.
A modern fleet of ships does not so much make use of the sea as exploit a highway.
To have his path made clear for him is the aspiration of every human being in our beclouded and tempestuous existence.
The last thing a woman will consent to discover in a man whom she loves, or on whom she simply depends, is want of courage.
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 too much.
Each blade of grass has its spot on earth whence it draws its life, its strength; and so is man rooted to the land from which he draws his faith together with his life.
Perhaps life is just that... a dream and a fear.
The sea - this truth must be confessed - has no generosity. No display of manly qualities - courage, hardihood, endurance, faithfulness - has ever been known to touch its irresponsible consciousness of power.
It is to be remarked that a good many people are born curiously unfitted for the fate waiting them on this earth.
It is a maudlin and indecent verity that comes out through the strength of wine.
You can't, in sound morals, condemn a man for taking care of his own integrity. It is his clear duty.
You shall judge a man by his foes as well as by his friends.
The sea has never been friendly to man. At most it has been the accomplice of human restlessness.
A man's real life is that accorded to him in the thoughts of other men by reason of respect or natural love.
