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"They trespassed upon my thoughts. They were intruders whose knowledge of life was to me an irritating pretense, because I felt so sure they could not possibly know the things I knew. Their bearing, which was simply the bearing of commonplace individuals going about their business in the assurance of perfect safety, was offensive to me like the outrageous flauntings of folly in the face of a danger it is unable to comprehend. I had no particular desire to enlighten them, but I had some difficulty in restraining myself from laughing in their faces, so full of stupid importance."
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Exlpore more Ego quotes
"The ego survives only in conflict. Peace is the death of the ego."
"Never let your ego get so close to your position that when your position goes, your ego goes with it."
Ego,
"Don't let your ego get too close to your position, so that if your position gets shot down, your ego doesn't go with it."
Ego,
"My ego is controlled enough that I don't have to be the focus."
"I get pretty terrified, to be honest, when I'm on tour. You really have to muster a lot of ego to go our there, which I find rather draining."
Explore more quotes by Joseph Conrad
"An artist is a man of action, whether he creates a personality, invents an expedient, or finds the issue of a complicated situation."
"I take it that what all men are really after is some form or perhaps only some formula of peace."
"But the artist appeals to that part of our being which is not dependent on wisdom; to that in us which is a gift and not an acquisition- and, therefore, more permanently enduring. He speaks to our capacity for delight and wonder, to the sense of mystery surrounding our lives; to our sense of pity, and beauty, and pain; to the latent feeling of fellowship with all creation- and to the subtle but invincible conviction of solidarity that knits together the loneliness of innumerable hearts, to the solidarity in dreams, in joy, in sorrow, in aspirations, in illusions, in hope, in fear, which binds men to each other, which binds together all humanity- the dead to the living and the living to the unborn."
"I don't like work--no man does--but I like what is in the work--the chance to find yourself. Your own reality--for yourself not for others--what no other man can ever know. They can only see the mere show, and never can tell what it really means."
"And because you not always can keep your eyes shut there comes the real trouble--the heart pain--the world pain. I tell you, my friend, it is not good for you to find you cannot make your dream come true, for the reason that you not strong enough are, or not clever enough. . . . Ja! . . . And all the time you are such a fine fellow too! Wie? Was? Gott im Himmel! How can that be? Ha! ha! ha!"'The shadow prowling amongst the graves of butterflies laughed boisterously."
"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!"
"O youth! The strength of it, the faith of it, the imagination of it! To me she was not an old rattle-trap carting about the world a lot of coal for a freight--to me she was the endeavour, the test, the trial of life. I think of her with pleasure, with affection, with regret--as you would think of someone dead you have loved. I shall never forget her. . . . Pass the bottle."
"Well, you know, that was the worst of it - this suspicion of not being inhuman. It would come slowly to one. They howled and leaped, and spun, and made horrid faces; but what thrilled you was just the thought of their humanity - like yours - the thought of your remote kinship with this wild and passionate uproar."
"You know I hate, detest, and can't bear a lie, not because I am straighter than the rest of us, but simply because it appals me. There is a taint of death, a flavour of mortality in lies -which is exactly what I hate and detest in the world -what I want to forget. It makes me miserable and sick, like biting something rotten would do. Temperament, I suppose."
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