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The Secret Agent quotes
12 quotes from The Secret Agent by Joseph Conrad. Source: Project Gutenberg e-text #974 (public domain in the USA), the text this site’s reader shows. Each quote is copied exactly from that text and links to its passage in the reader; when this page was built, every quote was checked word for word against the reader’s text.
We can never cease to be ourselves.
Madness alone is truly terrifying, inasmuch as you cannot placate it either by threats, persuasion, or bribes.
— Spoken by a character · Chapter II
I am afraid that if you want to go down into history you’ll have to do something for it.
— Spoken by a character · Chapter VII
All idealisation makes life poorer. To beautify it is to take away its character of complexity—it is to destroy it.
— Spoken by a character · Chapter III
But there are more kinds of fools than one can guard against.
— Spoken by a character · Chapter IV
The condemned social order has not been built up on paper and ink, and I don’t fancy that a combination of paper and ink will ever put an end to it, whatever you may think.
— Spoken by a character · Chapter IV
Curiosity being one of the forms of self-revelation, a systematically incurious person remains always partly mysterious.
His instinct of a successful man had taught him long ago that, as a general rule, a reputation is built on manner as much as on achievement.
Nobody looked at him. He passed on unsuspected and deadly, like a pest in the street full of men.
For history is made with tools, not with ideas; and everything is changed by economic conditions—art, philosophy, love, virtue—truth itself!
True wisdom, which is not certain of anything in this world of contradictions, would have prevented him from attaining his present position.
A certain simplicity of thought is common to serene souls at both ends of the social scale.