Joseph Conrad (1857 – 1924)
Polish writer, working in England, regarded as one of the greatest novelists in the English language.
What makes mankind tragic is not that they are the victims of nature, it is that they are conscious of it.
The Westerly Wind asserting his sway from the south-west quarter is often like a monarch gone mad, driving forth with wild imprecations the most faithful of his courtiers to shipwreck, disaster, and death.
It is not the clear-sighted who lead the world. Great achievements are accomplished in a blessed, warm mental fog.
Nations it may be have fashioned their Governments, but the Governments have paid them back in the same coin.
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.
I remember my youth and the feeling that will never come back any more — the feeling that I could last for ever, outlast the sea, the earth, and all men; the deceitful feeling that lures us on to joys, to perils, to love, to vain effort — to death; the triumphant conviction of strength, the heat of life in the handful of dust, the glow in the heart that with every year grows dim, grows cold, grows small, and expires — and expires, too soon — too soon before life itself.