Quotes from Lord Jim

He was one of us.

The way is to the destructive element submit yourself, and with the exertions of your hands and feet in the water make the deep, deep sea keep you up.

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.

He passes away under a cloud, inscrutable at heart, forgotten, unforgiven, and excessively romantic.

They wanted facts. Facts! They demanded facts from him, as if facts could explain anything!

The real significance of crime is in its being a breach of faith with the community of mankind.

He goes away from a living woman to celebrate his pitiless wedding with a shadowy ideal of conduct.

There is nothing more enticing, disenchanting, and enslaving than the life at sea.

No man ever understands quite his own artful dodges to escape from the grim shadow of self-knowledge.

Hang ideas! They are tramps, vagabonds, knocking at the back-door of your mind, each taking a little of your substance, each carrying away some crumb of that belief in a few simple notions you must cling to if you want to live decently and would like to die easy!

It is when we try to grapple with another man's intimate need that we perceive how incomprehensible, wavering, and misty are the beings that share with us the sight of the stars and the warmth of the sun.

It's extraordinary how we go through life with eyes half shut, with dull ears, with dormant thoughts.

Each blade of grass has its spot on earth whence it draws its life, its strength; and so is man rooted to the land from which he draws his faith together with his life.

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.

How does one kill fear, I wonder? How do you shoot a spectre through the heart, slash off its spectral head, take it by its spectral throat?