Joseph Conrad Quotes

The devil lies brooding in the miser's chest.

Life seems sadly mishandled by humans, as if it's all too much for them - they spend so much time and energy hurting each other, making things worse, and fouling their own nest, all because they imagine things aren't good enough and should be made much better.

Passion, prejudice, and error, are characteristics of human nature ….. Literary talents may be prostituted, and the powers of genius debased to subserve the purposes of ambition or avarice.

As covetousness is the root of all evil, so poverty is, I believe, the worst of all snares.

The wickedness of men is that their power breeds stupidity and blindness.

Credulity is the common failing of inexperienced virtue; and he who is spontaneously suspicious may justly be charged with radical corruption.

People are just greedy animals, after all.

A highly developed moral nature joined to an undeveloped intellectual nature, an undeveloped artistic nature, and a very limited religious nature, is of necessity repulsive. It represents a bit of human nature a good bit, of course, but a bit only in disproportionate, unnatural and revolting prominence.

The human population is 90% gullible, violence-prone dipshits.

There isn't anything so grotesque or so incredible that the average human being can't believe it.

Men will gamble and plot and fight and fall, all for the winning of a trophy. A woman's heart, a piece of land, a kingdom, a lordship, a contract, a ship, an egg -- it hardly matters the which or the what, as soon as it is seen to be desired by one, another will make a prize of it.

Men are so simple of mind, and so much dominated by their immediate needs, that a deceitful man will always find plenty who are ready to be deceived.

To be great in our times too often means to have great prosperity and no moral magnanimity at all.

That plenty should produce either covetousness or prodigality is a perversion of providence; and yet the generality of men are the worse for their riches.

What is it men cannot be made to believe!

Man is the yokel par excellence, the booby unmatchable, the king dupe of the cosmos. He is chronically and unescapably deceived, not only by the other animals and by the delusive face of nature herself--by his incomparable talent for searching out and embracing what is false, and for overlooking and denying what is true.

For the wise man delights in establishing his merit, the brave man likes to show his courage in action, the covetous man is quick at seizing advantages, and the stupid man has no fear of death.

The man who believes in giraffes would swallow anything.

Gambling houses are temples where the most sordid and turbulent passions contend; there no spectator can be indifferent. A card or a small square of ivory interests more than the loss of an empire, or the ruin of an unoffending group of infants, and their nearest relatives.

Death and hell are never full, and neither are men's eyes.

Where poverty ceases, avarice begins.

It is not depravity that afflicts the human race so much as a general lack of intelligence.

Sleeping on a dragon's hoard with greedy, dragonish thoughts in his heart, he had become a dragon himself.

When credulity comes from the heart it does no harm to the intellect.

Fundamentally, people are suckers for the truth.