..life is just that... a dream and a fear *

Yannis Stavrou, Evening at the Port, oil on canvas

A great writer / artist

*Joseph Conrad / Quotes

There is something haunting in the light of the moon; it has all the dispassionateness of a disembodied soul, and something of its inconceivable mystery.

Woe to the man whose heart has not learned while young to hope, to love - and to put its trust in life.

Perhaps life is just that... a dream and a fear.

A man's most open actions have a secret side to them.

You shall judge a man by his foes as well as by his friends.

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.

He remembered that she was pretty, and, more, that she had a special grace in the intimacy of life. She had the secret of individuality which excites--and escapes.

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.

God is for men and religion is for women.

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.

It is to be remarked that a good many people are born curiously unfitted for the fate waiting them on this earth.

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.

It's extraordinary how we go through life with eyes half shut, with dull ears, with dormant thoughts. Perhaps it's just as well; and it may be that it is this very dullness that makes life to the incalculable majority so supportable and so welcome.

Between the conception and the creation, between the emotion and the response, falls the shadow.

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 endeavour to do, he drowns.

All a man can betray is his conscience.

It is respectable to have no illusions - and safe - and profitable, and dull.

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...

For every age is fed on illusions, lest men should renounce life early, and the human race come to an end.

It's queer how out of touch with the truth women are. They live in a world of their own, and there has never been anything like it, and never can be. It is too beautiful altogether, and if they were to set it up it would go to pieces before the first sunset.