"Go for it is the only way to be accepted to the circle of cold skulls the circle of your forefathers: Gilgamesh Hector Roland defenders of the kingdom of no frontiers and of the city of ashes Be faithful Go"

"You survived not to live on your time is short, you have to give a proof of truth"

"And do not forgive indeed it is beyond your power to forgive in the name of those betrayed at dawn"

"Go where the others have gone, to the tenebrous limit for the golden fleece of void, your ultimate prize go upright among those who are on their knees among those turning their backs on and those fallen to dust."

"Jeśli tematem sztuki będzie dzbanek rozbity mała rozbita dusza z wielkim żalem nad sobą to co po nas zostanie będzie jak płacz kochanków w małym brudnym hotelu kiedy świtają tapety"

"And now I won't be on any of them group photo (proud proof of my death in all literary weekly magazines in the world) when someone will say, look, you see - it's Zbyszek - pointing finger at a man struggling with a suitcase - but that's not it I'm someone else who isn't even from this industry there is no me and there is complete emptiness"

"And if the City falls and one survives he shall carry the City within on the roads of exile he shall be the City"

"His poems, even in English, seem to me finer than anything currently being written by any English or American poet."

"The liver is not a gentleman."

"Adieu prince I have tasks a sewer project and a decree on prostitutes and beggar I must also elaborate a better system of prisons since as you justly said Denmark is a prison I go to my affairs This night is born a star named Hamlet We shall never meet what I shall leave will not be worth a tragedy It is not for us to greet each other or bid farewell we live on archipelagos and that water these words what can they do what can they do prince."

"Now that we're alone we can talk prince man to man though you lie on the stairs and see no more than a dead ant."

"I turn to history not for lessons but to confront my experience with the experience of others and to win for myself a sense of responsibility for the state of the human conscience."

"There are neither graves nor death in Nature; there are various forms of existence, some of which enable us to be chemists, others only chemical substances."

"Money really is a great power, only one must know how to use it."

"In all of nature, a male belongs to a female that he fancies and who fancies him. And so among the animals there are no idiots. But with us!... I'm a Jew, so I musn't love a Christian woman... He's a merchant, so he's got no right to a countess... And you who've got no money, you've no rights to any woman at all..."

"For human nature is strange: the less we are inclined to self-sacrifice, the more we insist on it in others."

"And is there no war on today? It is the weapons that have changed, that's all. Instead of an axe or scythe or scimitar, they fight with roubles."

"A life whose beginning we do not remember, and whose end we do not know."

"Folly is as great as the sea, it will compass anything."

"Nature has done well and wisely, in not permitting a man to live forever and in bringing into the world ever new generations. An old person is a used-up machine [... He] has too many dogmas to [...] easily [...] believe in a new truth [...]; too many sympathies and antipathies [...] for him to come to love something unfamiliar; [...] too many habits to be able to settle on new ways. Let us add suspiciousness — the fruit of bitter experiences; a pessimism inseparable from all manner of disappointments; and finally, a general decline of powers from exhaustion [...]."

"Your true Pole starts to sweat at the second decimal place, at the fifth he runs a temperature, and at the seventh has a stroke..."

"‘There are two men in me,’ he thought, ‘one quite sensible, the other a lunatic. But I am not concerned with that any longer... What shall I do, though, if the sensible man wins?’"

"Pity is an emotion equally unpleasant to the bestower as to the recipient."

"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."

"For the great mass of mankind the only saving grace that is needed is steady fidelity to what is nearest to hand and heart in the short moment of each human effort."

"A man is a worker. If he is not that he is nothing."

"In plucking the fruit of memory one runs the risk of spoiling its bloom."

"Reality, as usual, beats fiction out of sight."

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

"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."

"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."

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

"It is not the clear-sighted who lead the world. Great achievements are accomplished in a blessed, warm mental fog."

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

"Being a woman is a terribly difficult trade since it consists principally of dealings with men."

"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."

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

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

"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 future is of our own making — and (for me) the most striking characteristic of the century is just that development, that maturing of our consciousness which should open our eyes to that truth."

"Facing it — always facing it — that's the way to get through."

"I had ambition not only to go farther than any man had ever been before, but as far as it was possible for a man to go."

"They are very fascinating and very terrible, these tales of Conrad's in which he brings civilisation to the judgment of nature, and causes it to shake like a withering tree."

"Only the essential is true; Joseph Conrad, in a letter of advice, drives this home by recommending deletions, explaining that these words are "not essential and therefore not true to the fact.""

"I think some of the greatest writing has been also about writers like Conrad or Nabokov, who have illuminated and given us fresh views about the new countries they adopted."

"Melville doesn't sentimentalize the ocean and the sea's unfortunates. Snivel in a wet hanky like Lord Jim."

"It is fashionable among my friends to disparage [Conrad]. It is even necessary. Living in a world of literary politics where one wrong opinion often proves fatal, one writes carefully.... It is agreed by most of the people I know that Conrad is a bad writer, just as it is agreed that T. S. Eliot is a good writer. And now he is dead and I wish to God they would have taken some great, acknowledged technician of a literary figure and left him to write his bad stories."

"Maybe my favorite book in the world...I have never started a novel...without rereading Victory. It opens up the possibilities of a novel. It makes it seem worth doing."

"Well there is an assumption there that Conrad's...Heart of Darkness is great art and I don't accept that. Great art flourishes on problems or anguish or prejudice. But the role of the writer must be very clear. The writer must not be on the side of oppression. In other words there must be no confusion. I write about prejudice; I write about wickedness; I write about murder, I write about rape: but I must not be caught on the side of murder or rape. It is as simple as that."

"He feared neither God, nor devil, nor man, nor wind, nor sea, nor his own conscience. And I believe he hated everybody and everything. But I think he was afraid to die. I believe I am the only man who ever stood up to him."