Frases de Joseph Conrad

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“Ser mulher é algo difícil, já que consiste basicamente em lidar com homens.”

“São essas pequenas coisas que fazem a grande diferença. Quando elas desapareccem, você tem de recorrer à sua força inata, à sua capacidade se ser fiel a si próprio. É claro que você pode ser tolo o bastante para cometer erros - estúpido demais até para perceber que está sendo assaltado pelos poderes das trevas. Suponho que nenhum tolo chegou a barganhar sua alma com o diabo; ou o tolo é tolo demais. ou o diabo demasiadamente diabólico - não sei qual é o caso. Ou pode ser que você seja uma criatura tão fantasticamente superior ao ponto de ficar surda e cega a tudo que não diga respeito a visões e sons celestiais. A Terra passa, então, a ser apenas um lugar de espera - e, se você perde ou ganha assim, não sei dizer. No entando, a maioria de nós não é uma coisa nem outra.”

“Sobrevivera às suas forças para ocultar magníficas dobras de eloqüencia as áridas trevas do se coração(…). Mas tanto o amor diabólico como o ódio sobrenatural dos mistérios que havia penetrado lutavam pela posse daquela alma saciada de primitivas emoções, ávida de falsa fama, de enganosa distinção, de todas as aparências de sucesso e poder.”

“O espírito revolucionário é muito conveniente. Ele liberta-nos de todos os escrúpulos no que se refere a ideias.”

“Vivemos como sonhamos, sozinhos.”

“Julga-se um homem tanto por seus inimigos quanto por seus amigos.”

“(…) um homem deveria enfrentar sua má sorte, sua consciência, e todas essas coisas. - Ora - o que mais há para se combater?”

“Não gosto de trabalhar - nenhum homem gosta -, mas gosto do que existe no trabalho - a oportunidade de encontrar-se a si própio. Sua própria realidade - para você mesmo, não para outros -, aquilo que nenhuma outra pessoa jamais poderia saber. eles podem apenas ver o resultado final, mas nunca dizer o que realmente significa.”

“(…) eu tinha de lidar com um ser para quem era inútil invocar o nome de o que quer que fosse (…). Não havia nada acima ou abaixo dele, e eu sabia disso. Desprendera-se da Terra a pontapés. Diabo de homem! Chutara a própria Terra, desfazendo-a em pedaços. Agora ele estava só, e, diante dele, eu não sabia se permanecia no chão ou flutuava no ar.”

“Ai do homem cujo coração não aprendeu enquanto jovem a ter esperança, a amar, e a colocar sua confiança na vida.”

“Acreditem ou não, sua mente encontrava-se perfeitamente lúcida… se bem que concentrada nele próprio com tremenda intensidade; e ali estava minha única oportunidade. (..). Mas sua alma havia enlouquecido. Estava sozinha na selva, havia olhado para dentro de si e, por Deus, não tenho dúvida de que enlouquecera (…). Nenhuma eloquência poderia ter sido tão devastora à nossa crença na humanidade como sua explosão final de sinceridade. Lutava com ele próprio também. Presenciei isso tudo, vendo-o… ouvindo-o. Vi o mistério inconcebível de uma alma que não conhecia limite, nem fé, nem medo, embora lutasse cegamente contra si propria.”

“Coisa engraçada é a vida - misterioso arranjo de lógica implacável para um propósito fútil. O máximo que você pode esperar dela é algum conhecimento de si próprio… que chega tarde demais… uma colheita de inegotáveis arrependimentos. (..). Se tal é a forma da última e definitiva sabedoria, então a vida é um quebra-cabeças maior do que alguns de nós supõem que seja. Eu estava milímetrios da minha última oportunidade para fazer um pronunciamento, e descobri, com humilhãoção, que provavelmente não teria nada para dizer. Essa é a razão pela qual afirmo que Kurtz foi um homem notável. ele tinha algo a dizer. E disse. como eu próprio estive à beira do abismo, compreendi melhor o significado daquele seu olhar, que não podia ver a chama da vela, mas era amplo o suficiente para abraçar o universo inteiro, pungente o bastante para penetrar todos os corações que batem na escuridão. ele havia resumido - num juízo. ' O horror”

“Não gosto do trabalho, ninguém gosta; mas gosto do que é no trabalho a ocasião de se descobrir a si próprio.”

“O autor escreve apenas metade de um livro. A outra metade fica por conta do leitor.”

“A fé no sobrenatural é uma fonte do mal, não necessariamente…Homens sozinhos são capazes de qualquer fraqueza.”

“(…) a verdade é que, no meu corpo, ele 'só iria encontrar calafrios e, na minha cabeça, nada além de preocupação (…).”

“Sua escuridão era impentrável. Olhava para ele como olharia alguém que se encontra no fundo de um precipício onde o sol nunca brilha.”

“O horror! O horror!”

“Cada nação é conhecida no estrangeiro, fundamentalmente, pelos seus defeitos.”

“A realidade, como sempre, suplanta a ficção.”

“Quem sabe o que é a verdadeira felicidade? Não a palavra convencional mas o terror manifesto. Para os solitários, usa máscara. A casta mais infeliz guarda alguma lembrança ou alguma ilusão.”

“Para mim, escrever é apenas uma conversão das minhas forças em frases.”

“Podereis avaliar um homem tanto pelos seus inimigos, como pelos seus amigos.”

“Toda ambição é legítima, salvo aquelas que se erguem sobre as misérias e as crendices da humanidade.”

“O homem é trabalhador. Se não é isto então não é nada.”

“Enfrentar, sempre enfrentar, é a única forma de sair airoso. Enfrenta.”

“Reality, as usual, beats fiction out of sight.”

“A man is a worker. If he is not that he is nothing.”

“Running all over the sea trying to get behind the weather.”

“Then, on the slight turn of the Lower Hope Reach, clusters of factory chimneys come distinctly into view, tall and slender above the squat ranges of cement works in Grays and Greenhithe. Smoking quietly at the top against the great blaze of a magnificent sunset, they give an industrial character to the scene, speak of work, manufactures, and trade, as palm-groves on the coral strands of distant islands speak of the luxuriant grace, beauty and vigour of tropical nature. The houses of Gravesend crowd upon the shore with an effect of confusion as if they had tumbled down haphazard from the top of the hill at the back. The flatness of the Kentish shore ends there. A fleet of steam-tugs lies at anchor in front of the various piers. A conspicuous church spire, the first seen distinctly coming from the sea, has a thoughtful grace, the serenity of a fine form above the chaotic disorder of men’s houses. But on the other side, on the flat Essex side, a shapeless and desolate red edifice, a vast pile of bricks with many windows and a slate roof more inaccessible than an Alpine slope, towers over the bend in monstrous ugliness, the tallest, heaviest building for miles around, a thing like an hotel, like a mansion of flats (all to let), exiled into these fields out of a street in West Kensington. Just round the corner, as it were, on a pier defined with stone blocks and wooden piles, a white mast, slender like a stalk of straw and crossed by a yard like a knitting-needle, flying the signals of flag and balloon, watches over a set of heavy dock-gates. Mast-heads and funnel-tops of ships peep above the ranges of corrugated iron roofs. This is the entrance to Tilbury Dock, the most recent of all London docks, the nearest to the sea.”

“Faith is a myth and beliefs shift like mists on the shore; thoughts vanish; words, once pronounced, die; and the memory of yesterday is as shadowy as the hope of to-morrow….
In this world – as I have known it – we are made to suffer without the shadow of a reason, of a cause or of guilt….
There is no morality, no knowledge and no hope; there is only the consciousness of ourselves which drives us about a world that… is always but a vain and fleeting appearance….
A moment, a twinkling of an eye and nothing remains – but a clod of mud, of cold mud, of dead mud cast into black space, rolling around an extinguished sun. Nothing. Neither thought, nor sound, nor soul. Nothing.”

“Protection is the first necessity of opulence and luxury.”

“There is no credulity so eager and blind as the credulity of covetousness, which, in its universal extent, measures the moral misery and the intellectual destitution of mankind.”

“The truth was that he died from solitude, the enemy known but to few on this Earth, and whom only the simplest of us are fit to withstand. The brilliant Costaguanaro of the boulevards had died from solitude and want of faith in himself and others.”

“One wonders that there can be found a man courageous enough to occupy the post. It is a matter of meditation. Having given it a few minutes I come to the conclusion in the serenity of my heart and the peace of my conscience that he must be either an extreme megalomaniac or an utterly unconscious being.”

“The more I write the less substance do I see in my work, … It is tolerably awful. And I face it, I face it but the fright is growing on me. My fortitude is shaken by the view of the monster. It does not move; its eyes are baleful; it is as still as death itself — and it will devour me. Its stare has eaten into my soul already deep, deep.”

“Coming in from the eastward, the bright colouring of the [Nore] lightship marking the part of the river committed to the charge of an Admiral (the Commander-in-Chief at the Nore) accentuates the dreariness and the great breadth of the Thames Estuary. But soon the course of the ship opens the entrance of the Medway, with its men-of-war moored in line, and the long wooden jetty of Port Victoria, with its few low buildings like the beginning of a hasty settlement upon a wild and unexplored shore. The famous Thames barges sit in brown clusters upon the water with an effect of birds floating upon a pond… [The inward-bound ships] all converge upon the Nore, the warm speck of red upon the tones of drab and gray, with the distant shores running together towards the west, low and flat, like the sides of an enormous canal. The sea-reach of the Thames is straight, and, once Sheerness is left behind, its banks seem very uninhabited, except for the cluster of houses which is Southend, or here and there a lonely wooden jetty where petroleum ships discharge their dangerous cargoes, and the oil-storage tanks, low and round with slightly-domed roofs, peep over the edge of the fore-shore, as it were a village of Central African huts imitated in iron. Bordered by the black and shining mud-flats, the level marsh extends for miles. Away in the far background the land rises, closing the view with a continuous wooded slope, forming in the distance an interminable rampart overgrown with bushes.”

“History repeats itself, but the special call of an art which has passed away is never reproduced. It is as utterly gone out of the world as the song of a destroyed wild bird.”

“The sea — this truth must be confessed — has no generosity. No display of manly qualities — courage, hardihood, endurance, faithfulness — has ever been known to touch its irresponsible consciousness of power.”

“Egoism, which is the moving force of the world, and altruism, which is its morality, these two contradictory instincts, of which one is so plain and the other so mysterious, cannot serve us unless in the incomprehensible alliance of their irreconcilable antagonism.”

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

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

“This could have occurred nowhere but in England, where men and sea interpenetrate, so to speak.”

“To the destruction of what is.”

“To have his path made clear for him is the aspiration of every human being in our beclouded and tempestuous existence.”

“When he stepped off the straight and narrow path of his peculiar honesty, it was with an inward assertion of unflinching resolve to fall back again into the monotonous but safe stride of virtue as soon as his little excursion into the wayside quagmires had produced the desired effect.”

“The air of the New World seems favorable to the art of declamation.”

“I call to mind a winter landscape in Amsterdam — a flat foreground of waste land, with here and there stacks of timber, like the huts of a camp of some very miserable tribe; the long stretch of the Handelskade; cold, stone-faced quays, with the snow-sprinkled ground and the hard, frozen water of the canal, in which were set ships one behind another with their frosty mooring-ropes hanging slack and their decks idle and deserted, because… their cargoes were frozen-in up-country on barges and schuyts. In the distance, beyond the waste ground, and running parallel with the line of ships, a line of brown, warm-toned houses seemed bowed under snow-laden roofs. From afar at the end of Tsar Peter Straat, issued in the frosty air the tinkle of bells of the horse tramcars, appearing and disappearing in the opening between the buildings, like little toy carriages harnessed with toy horses and played with by people that appeared no bigger than children.”

“I can't tell if a straw ever saved a drowning man, but I know that a mere glance is enough to make despair pause. For in truth we who are creatures of impulse are not creatures of despair.”

“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.”

“Between the crowded houses of Gravesend and the monstrous red-brick pile on the Essex shore the ship is surrendered fairly to the grasp of the river. That hint of loneliness, that soul of the sea which had accompanied her as far as the Lower Hope Reach, abandons her at the turn of the first bend above. The salt, acrid flavour is gone out of the air, together with a sense of unlimited space opening free beyond the threshold of sandbanks below the Nore. The waters of the sea rush on past Gravesend, tumbling the big mooring buoys laid along the face of the town; but the sea-freedom stops short there, surrendering the salt tide to the needs, the artifices, the contrivances of toiling men. Wharves, landing-places, dock-gates, waterside stairs, follow each other continuously right up to London Bridge, and the hum of men’s work fills the river with a menacing, muttering note as of a breathless, ever-driving gale. The water-way, so fair above and wide below, flows oppressed by bricks and mortar and stone, by blackened timber and grimed glass and rusty iron, covered with black barges, whipped up by paddles and screws, overburdened with craft, overhung with chains, overshadowed by walls making a steep gorge for its bed, filled with a haze of smoke and dust.”

“The world of finance is a mysterious world in which, incredible as the fact may appear, evaporation precedes liquidation.”

“As to honour — you know — it's a very fine mediaeval inheritance which women never got hold of. It wasn't theirs.”

“The last thing a woman will consent to discover in a man whom she loves, or on whom she simply depends, is want of courage.”

“Nations it may be have fashioned their Governments, but the Governments have paid them back in the same coin.”