The best Lord Jim quotes

Youth is insolent; it is its right – its necessity; it has got to assert itself, and all assertion in this world of doubts is a defiance, is an insolence…

This magnificent butterfly finds a little heap of dirt and sits still on it; but man he will never on his heap of mud keep still.

[Chapter 20]

And a word carries far-very far-deals destruction through time as the bullets go flying through space.

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

My task, which I am trying to achieve is, by the power of the written word, to make you hear, to make you feel--it is, before all, to make you see.

I am a great foe of favoritism in public life, in private life, and even in the delicate relationship of an author to his works.

Men act badly sometimes without being much worse than others.

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.

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.

[Chapter 16]

It is my belief no man ever understands quite his own artful dodges to escape from the grim shadow of self-knowledge.

Never test another man by your own weakness.

Some great men owe most of their greatness to the ability of detecting in those they destine for their tools the exact quality of strength that matters for their work.

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

[Chapter 14]

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.

Vanity plays lurid tricks with our memory, and the truth of every passion wants some pretence to make it live.