Victory Quotes

“Woe to the man whose heart has not learned while young to hope, to love - and to put it's trust in life!”
― Joseph Conrad, Victory

“The use of reason is to justify the obscure desires that move our conduct, impulses, passions, prejudices and follies, and also our fears.”
― Joseph Conrad, Victory

“The Zangiacomo band was not making music; it was simply murdering silence with a vulgar, ferocious energy.”
― Joseph Conrad, Victory

“She was engaged in the task of defending her position in life," said Heyst. "It's a very respectable task.”
― Joseph Conrad, Victory

“dreams are madness, my dear. It's things that happen in the waking world, while one is asleep, that one would be glad to know the meaning of.”
― Joseph Conrad, Victory

“The world of finance is a mysterious world in which, incredible as the fact may appear, evaporation precedes liquidation. First the capital evaporates, and then the company goes into liquidation. These are very unnatural physics ...”
― Joseph Conrad, Victory

“It was the very essence of his life to be a solitary achievement, accomplished not by hermit-like withdrawal with it's silence and immobility but by a system of restless wandering, by the detachment of an impermanent dweller amongst changing scenes. In this scheme he had perceived the means of passing through life without suffering and almost without a single care in the world- invulnerable because elusive.”
― Joseph Conrad, Victory

“I believe in children praying--well, women, too, but I rather think God expects men to be more self-reliant. I don't hold with a man everlastingly bothering the Almighty with his silly troubles.”
― Joseph Conrad, Victory

“A diplomatic statement ... is a statement of which everything is true but the sentiment which seems to prompt it.”
― Joseph Conrad, Victory

“He had entered by then the broad, human path of inconsistencies.”
― Joseph Conrad, Victory

“There is, as every schoolboy knows in this scientific age, a very close chemical relation between coal and diamonds. It is the reason, I believe, why some people allude to coal as "black diamonds." Both these commodities represent wealth; but coal is a much less portable form of property. There is, from that point of view, a deplorable lack of concentration in coal. Now, if a coal-mine could be put into one's waistcoat pocket—but it can't! At the same time, there is a fascination in coal, the supreme commodity of the age in which we are camped like bewildered travellers in a garish, unrestful hotel.”
― Joseph Conrad, Victory

“You see we had on the whole liked him well enough. And liking is not sufficient to keep going the interest one takes in a human being. With hatred, apparently, it is otherwise.”
― Joseph Conrad, Victory

“But there is an unholy fascination in systematic noise. He did not flee from it incontinently, as one might have expected him to do. He remained, astonished at himself for remaining, since nothing could have been more repulsive to his tastes, more painful to his senses, and, so to speak, more contrary to his genius, than this rude exhibition of vigour. The Zangiacomo band was not making music; it was simply murdering silence with a vulgar, ferocious energy. One felt as if witnessing a deed of violence; and that impression was so strong that it seemed marvelous to see the people sitting so quietly on their chairs, drinking so calmly out of their glasses, and giving no signs of distress, anger, or fear. Heyst averted his gaze from the unnatural spectacle of their indifference.”
― Joseph Conrad, Victory

“The islands are very quiet. One sees them lying about, clothed in their dark garments of leaves, in a great hush of silver and azure, where the sea without murmurs meets the sky in a ring of magic stillness.”
― Joseph Conrad, Victory

“They give you wages as they'd fling a bone to a dog, and they expect you to be grateful. It's worse than slavery. You don't expect a slave that's bought for money to be grateful. And if you sell your work - what is it but selling your own self? You've got so many days to live and you sell them one after another. Hey? Who can pay me enough for my life? Ah! But they throw at you your week's money and expect you to say, "thank you" before you pick it up.”
― Joseph Conrad, Victory

“The girl he had come across, of whom he had possessed himself, to whose presence he was not yet accustomed, with whom he did not yet know how to live; that human being so near and still so strange, gave him a greater sense of his own reality than he had ever known in all his life.”
― Joseph Conrad, Victory

“As is often the case with lawless natures, Ricardo’s faith in any given individual was of a simple, unquestioning character. For man must have some support in life.”
― Joseph Conrad, Victory

“Wilful murder?' says he in his quiet way. 'What the deuce is that? What are you talking about? People do get killed sometimes when they get in one's way, but that's self-defence—you understand?”
― Joseph Conrad, Victory

“And in this case his great practice in it was assisted by hate, which, like love, has an eloquence of its own.”
― Joseph Conrad, Victory

“Occupation? Put down, well – tourists. We’ve been called harder names before now;”
― Joseph Conrad, Victory

“Formerly, in solitude and in silence, he had been used to think clearly and sometimes even profoundly, seeing life outside the flattering optical delusion of everlasting hope, of conventional self-deceptions, of an ever-expected happiness.”
― Joseph Conrad, Victory

“His mind, cool, alert, watched it sink there with a sort of vague concern at the absurdity of the occupation, till it rested at the bottom, deep down, where our unexpressed longings lie.”
― Joseph Conrad, Victory

“Nothing is more painful than the shock of sharp contradictions that lacerate our intelligence and our feelings.”
― Joseph Conrad, Victory

“He was easily sorry for people.”
― Joseph Conrad, Victory

“And incompleteness of any sort leads to trouble.”
― Joseph Conrad, Victory

“After the cold gust of wind there was an absolute stillness of the air. The thunder-charged mass hung unbroken beyond the low, ink-black headland, darkening the twilight. By contrast, the sky at the zenith displayed pellucid clearness, the sheen of a delicate glass bubble which the merest movement of air might shatter. A little to the left, between the black masses of the headland and of the forest, the volcano, a feather of smoke by day and a cigar-glow at night, took its first fiery expanding breath of the evening. Above it a reddish star came out like an expelled spark from the fiery bosom of the earth, enchanted into permanency by the mysterious spell of frozen spaces.”
― Joseph Conrad, Victory

“And Heyst, the son, read:

Of the stratagems of life the most cruel is the consolation of love—the most subtle, too; for the desire is the bed of dreams.”
― Joseph Conrad, Victory

“To slay, to love—the greatest enterprises of life upon a man! And I have no experience of either.”
― Joseph Conrad, Victory

“What captivated my fancy was that I, Axel Heyst, the most detached of creatures in this earthly captivity, the veriest tramp on this earth, an indifferent stroller going through the world's bustle—that I should have been there to step into the situation of an agent of Providence. I, a man of universal scorn and unbelief...”
― Joseph Conrad, Victory

“The islands are very quiet. One sees them lying about, clothed in their dark garments of leaves, in a great hush of silver and azure, where the sea without murmurs meets the sky in a ring of magic stillness. A sort of smiling somnolence broods over them; the very voices of their people are soft and subdued, as if afraid to break some protecting spell.
Perhaps this was the very spell which had enchanted Heyst in the early days.”
― Joseph Conrad, Victory