#v

The scrupulous and the just, the noble, humane, and devoted natures; the unselfish and the intelligent may begin a movement - but it passes away from them. They are not the leaders of a revolution. They are its victims. ↗

— Joseph Conrad

#begin #devoted #humane #intelligent #just

An artist is a man of action, whether he creates a personality, invents an expedient, or finds the issue of a complicated situation. ↗

— Joseph Conrad

#artist #complicated #creates #expedient #finds

Romance is tempestuous. Love is calm. ↗

— Mason Cooley

#calm #love #love is #romance #tempestuous

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. ↗

— Joseph Conrad

#conscious #detached #feelings #impossible #informed

A man's real life is that accorded to him in the thoughts of other men by reason of respect or natural love. ↗

— Joseph Conrad

#him #life #love #man #men

Any work that aspires, however humbly, to the condition of art should carry its justification in every line. ↗

— Joseph Conrad

#art #aspires #carry #condition #every

There is more beauty in truth, even if it is a dreadful beauty. The storytellers at the city gate twist life so that it looks sweet to the lazy and the stupid and the weak, and this only strengthens their infirmities and teaches nothing, cures nothing, nor does it let the heart soar. ↗

— John Steinbeck

#favorite #steinbeck #beauty

The changes in our life must come from the impossibility to live otherwise than according to the demands of our conscience not from our mental resolution to try a new form of life. ↗

— Leo Tolstoy

#changes #come #conscience #demands #form

Only in men's imagination does every truth find an effective and undeniable existence. Imagination, not invention, is the supreme master of art as of life. ↗

— Joseph Conrad

#does #effective #every #existence #find

There are men here and there to whom the whole of life is like an after-dinner hour with a cigar; easy, pleasant, empty, perhaps enlivened by some fable of strife to be forgotten - before the end is told - even if there happens to be any end to it. ↗

— Joseph Conrad

#any #before #cigar #easy #empty