The true peace of God begins at any spot a thousand miles from the nearest land.

Conrad’s line frames the open sea—specifically the deep ocean far from any coastline—as a place where human noise, social obligation, and political or commercial entanglements fall away. “Peace of God” suggests not merely quiet but a kind of elemental, impersonal order: the vastness that dwarfs individual will and returns a person to humility before nature. The “thousand miles” is less a measurement than a threshold of remoteness, implying that true peace begins only when one has crossed beyond the reach of land-based life and its conflicts. In Conrad’s maritime imagination, such distance can be both consoling (purifying solitude) and unsettling (indifference of the universe).