Such Is Life quotes

Contrary to usage, these memoirs are published, not “in compliance with the entreaties of friends” but in direct opposition thereto.

It has been pointed out to me that the prizes of civilisation—Municipal dignity, Churchwardenship, the Honorary Bench, and so forth—do not wait upon avowed comradeship with people who can by no management of hyperbole be called respectable.

The fore part of the day was altogether devoid of interest or event.

Overhead, the sun blazing wastefully and thanklessly through a rarefied atmosphere; underfoot the hot, black clay, thirsting for spring rain

, and bare except for inedible roley-poleys, coarse tussocks, and the woody stubble of close-eaten salt-bush; between sky and earth, a solitary wayfarer, wisely lapt in philosophic torpor. Ten yards behind the grey saddle-horse follows a black packhorse, lightly loaded;

At my suggestion, the half-caste unhitched and tried Fancy, while I mounted the black horse, and turned him across the plain. I tried him at all paces; but never before had I met with anything to equal that elastic step and long, easy, powerful stride.

To ride that horse was to feel free, exultant, invincible.

His gallop was like “Marching Through Georgia,” vigorously rendered by a good brass band.

“I hope so,” replied Cooper devoutly. “Lord knows, it’s badly wanted; and I’m sure we don’t grudge nobody the benefit. Turnin’ out nice an’ cool, ain’t it? The bullocks’ll be able to do their selves some sort o’ justice.”

It was a clear but moonless night; the dark blue canopy spangled with myriad stars⁠—grandeur, peace, and purity above; squalor, worry, and profanity below.

Fit basis for many an ancient system of Theology—unscientific, if you will, but by no means contemptible.

“Yes; that’s one way of looking at it,” muttered Thompson, after a pause. The other fellows were silently and futilely wrestling with the apparent anomaly.

A metaphysical question keeps slipping away from the grasp of the bullock driver’s mind like a wet melon-seed.

[Yet the solution is simple. The upcountry man is decidedly openhanded; he will submit to crushing losses with cheerfulness, tempered, of course, by humility in those cases where he recognises the operation of an overhanging curse;

Moreover, there are few advantages in training which do not, according to present social arrangements, involve corresponding penalties.

Human ignorance is, after all, more variable in character than in extent.

Each sphere of life, each occupation, is burdened with its own special brand of this unhappy heritage. To remove one small section of inborn ignorance is a lifework for any man.

The “gentleman” may be a drunkard, a gambler, a debauchee, a parasite, a helpless potterer; he may be a man of spotless life, able and honest; but he must on no account be a man with broad palms, a workman amongst workmen.

The “gentleman” is not necessarily gentle; but he is necessarily genteel.

Etymology is not at fault here; gentility, and gentility alone, is the qualification of the “gentleman.”

Here is another little subterfuge. This is one of those taking expressions which are repeated from parrot to magpie till they seem to acquire axiomatic force. It is such men’s ignorance—their technical ignorance—that is their curse.

Education of any kind never was, and never can be, a curse to its possessor; it is a curse only to the person whose interest lies in exploiting its possessor.

Erudition, even in the humblest sphere of life, is the sweetest solace, the unfailing refuge, of the restless mind;

And, to my genuine astonishment, he did buck-lep. But he took no mean advantage of his rider; he allowed him time to find the off stirrup, and then led off with a forward spring about five feet high.

Willoughby⁠—small blame to him⁠—was jerked clean out of the saddle, and lit fair across the horse’s loins; in the impulse of self-preservation grasping the cantle with both hands.

The small thigh-pads afforded a good rough hold, and the next buck jammed the poor fellow well under the seat of the saddle. The position was neither pleasant nor dignified, though certainly more secure for an amateur than the conventional style;

The ground was cut up as if rooted by pigs; yet Cleopatra was only just warming to his work; and the whaler was still clinging to the saddle like a native bear to a branch.

“God help thee, Jack,” I remarked listlessly; “thou hast a bitter breakfast on’t.”

“He’ll tire the horse out yet,” said Thompson, with an artificial yawn. “Good lad, Willoughby! stick to him a bit longer.”

So it was time for the man with a stake in the country to think about doing something.

Divide and govern! A good ideal though not a new one!

And, providentially, here was the latent spark of religious dissent, ready to respond to the foulest breath ever blown from the lips of Greed. In 1785 the spark was first fanned into flame, with the best results;

Eucalypt, conifer, mimosa; tree, shrub, heath, in endless diversity and exuberance, yet sheltering little of animal life beyond half-specialised and belated types, anachronistic even to the Aboriginal savage. Faithfully and lovingly interpreted, what is the latent meaning of it all?

Our virgin continent! how long has she tarried her bridal day!

Pause and think how she has waited in serene loneliness while the deltas of Nile, Euphrates, and Ganges expanded, inch by inch, to spacious provinces, and the Yellow Sea shallowed up with the silt of winters innumerable—waited while the primordial civilisations of Copt, Accadian, Aryan …

… the Slough of Despond, and the other across the Delectable Mountains, but you don’t know whether the section will prove rough or smooth, or whether it ends in a junction or a terminus, till the cloven mists of the future melt into a manifest present.

We know what we are, but we know not what we shall be.

Often the shunting seems a mere trifle; but, in reality, the switch is that wizard-wand which brings into evidence such corollaries of life as felicity or misery, peace or tribulation, honour or ignominy, found on the permanent way.

but, in reality, the switch is that wizard-wand which brings into evidence such corollaries of life as felicity or misery, peace or tribulation, honour or ignominy, found on the permanent way. For others, remember, as well as for ourselves.

No one except the anchorite lives to himself; and he is merely a person who evades his responsibilities.

Here and there you find a curious complication of lines. From a junction in front, there stretches out into the mist a single line and a double line;

… beyond the earliest era noted by ethnography, this original Brito-Irish race must have differentiated itself from the unknown archetype, and, by mere genealogical succession, must have fixed its characteristics so tenaciously as to persist through the random admixture of conquests and colonisations during countless generations.

“God is eternal,” says a fine French apothegm, “but man is very old.”

And very new. Mary O’Halloran was perfect Young-Australian. To describe her from after-knowledge—she was a very creature of the phenomena which had environed her own dawning intelligence. She was a child of the wilderness, a dryad among her kindred trees.

I remained in the house, confiding to Mrs. O’Halloran the high respect which Rory’s principles and abilities had always commanded. But she was past all that; and I had to give it up.

When a woman can listen with genuine contempt to the spontaneous echo of her husband’s popularity, it is a sure sign that she has explored the profound depths of masculine worthlessness; and there is no known antidote to this fatal enlightenment.

Rory’s next duty was to chop up a bit of firewood, and stack it beside the door. Dusk was gathering by this time; and Mrs. O’Halloran called Mary to prepare her for the night, while Rory and I seated ourselves on the bucket-stool outside.

He knew that his own contumacy in this respect would land his soul in perdition, and he deliberately let it go at that. Brave old Rory!

Never does erratic man appear to such advantage as when his own intuitive moral sense rigorously overbears a conscientiousness warped by some fallacy which he still accepts as truth.

Yet the mother loved the child in her own hard, puritanical way.

he is the man who, with some incoherent protest and becoming invective, metaphorically makes a Raleigh-cloak of himself, to afford free and pleasant passage for the noblest work of God, namely, the Business Man.

The successful pioneer is the man who never spared others; the forgotten pioneer is the man who never spared himself, but, being a fool, built houses for wise men to live in, and omitted to gather moss.

The former is the early bird; the latter is the early worm. Like Rosalind’s typical traveller, this worm has rich eyes and poor hands—the former often ophthalmic, the latter always brown and wrinkled, and generally dirty.

I don’t blame people for not givin’ work when they got no work to give, but they might be civil—” he paused, and went on with his repast in silence for a minute. It required no great prescience to read his thought.

Man must be subject to sale by auction, or be a wearer of Imperial uniform, before the susceptibility to insult perishes in his soul.

“I been carryin’ a swag close on twenty year,” he resumed; “but I never got sich a divil of a blaggardin’ as I got this mornin’. Course, I’m wrong to swear about it, but that’s a thing I ain’t in the habit o’ doin’.

exposing a pair of legs, very long, and very thin, and very hairy, and very dirty.”

Strange! to think that man, noble in reason, infinite in faculty, and so forth, should depend so entirely for his dignity upon a pair of ⸻. But such is life.

Approaching the house, I judged by the style of window curtains that the light was in a bedroom. I made my way to the front door, and knocked.

Still, in pursuance of my custom, I endeavoured to find tongues in the mosquitos (no difficult matter); books in the patches of cutting-grass; sermons in the Scotch thistles; and good in everything.

Light and Darkness!⁠—aptest of metaphors!

And see how the symbolism permeates our language, from the loftiest poetry to the most trifling colloquialism. “There is no darkness but ignorance,” says the pleasantest of stage fools; “in which thou art more puzzled than the Egyptians in their fog.”

Yet it is only the abstract and brief chronicle of a fair average day; a day happy in having no history worth mentioning; merely a drowsy morning, an idle midday, and a stirring afternoon.

Life is largely composed of such uneventful days; and these are therefore most worthy of careful analysis.

How easy it is to recall the scene! The Lachlan river, filled by summer rains far away among the mountains, to a width of something like thirty yards, flowing silently past, and going to waste.

and the boundary fence crosses it, post after post, in diminishing perspective, like any fence standing in shallow, sunlit water. The most critical and deliberate examination can no more detect evidence of fantasy in the unreal water than in the real fence.

The mirage is one of Nature’s obscure and cheerless jokes; and in this instance, as in some few others, she is beyond Art.

She even assists the illusion by a very slight depression of the plain in the right place. In fact, an artist’s picture of a mirage would be his picture of a level-brimmed, unruffled lake;

The outlaw turned away his face.

“Short of being Swift,” says Taine; “one must love something.”

(Ay, and short of being too morally slow to catch grubs, one must hate something. See, then, that you hate prayerfully and judiciously).

The very curse that was on him seemed to protect him from the mishaps that befell other men in his line of work; and he found life worth living for the sake of hating and despising the whole human race, including himself.

There’s no pleasure like the pleasure of being a devil, when you feel yourself master of the situation, and⁠—Now I’ve done, Collins.

”

… resume the old persecuted life, still achieving, still pursuing, that strictly congruous penalty which waits upon the man whose life is one protracted challenge to a world wherein no person except the systematic and successful hypocrite has too many friends, or too good a character.

Any fool can get himself hated, if he goes the right way to work; but the game was never yet worth a rap, for a rational man to play.

This in clear view of the fact that most people lose more by their friends than by their enemies. But there are few sins more odious than ill-nature; and there’s nothing blessed about the persecution you undergo on that account. Your position is not heroic;

… exalted of soul for barrow-work, and too comprehensively witless for anything else, he was shifted by the angels to a better world—a world where the Christian gentleman is duly recognised, and where Socialistic carpenters, vulgar fishermen, and all manner of undesirable people, do the washing-up.

Stewart, it must be admitted, was no gentleman.

Starting with a generous handicap, as the younger son of a wealthy and aristocratic Scottish laird, he had, during a Colonial race of forty years, daily committed himself by actions which shut him out from the fine old title.

Between one thing and another, it might have been about three in the afternoon when, with Pup reposing by my side, I finally settled down to an after-dinner smoke from the sage meerschaum often deservedly noticed in these annals.

The two greatest supra-physical pleasures of life are antithetical in operation.

One is to have something to do, and to know that you are doing it deftly and honestly. The other is to have nothing to do, and to know that you are carrying out your blank programme like a good and faithful menial.

And in two minutes, his relaxed pose and regular breathing affirmed a kind of fellowship with the rest, in spite of his alien birth and objectionable name. But I couldn’t sleep.

Dear innocent, angel-faced Mary! perishing alone in the bush!

Nature’s precious link between a squalid past and a nobler future, broken, snatched away from her allotted place in the long chain of the ages! Heiress of infinite hope, and dowered with latent fitness to fulfil her part, now so suddenly fallen by the wayside!

How many relics to be contemplated with that morbid fascination for the re-quickening of a slumbering and intolerable sense of bereavement! But the saddest and most precious of memorials will be those little copper-toed boots that she left along the way.

Deepest pathos lies only in homely things, since the frailness of mortality is the pathetic centre, and mortality is nothing but homely.

Hence, no relic is so affecting as the half-worn boots of the dead. Thus in the funeral of that gold-escort trooper, when I was but little older than poor Mary.

But the saddest and most precious of memorials will be those little copper-toed boots that she left along the way. Deepest pathos lies only in homely things, since the frailness of mortality is the pathetic centre, and mortality is nothing but homely.

Hence, no relic is so affecting as the half-worn boots of the dead.

Thus in the funeral of that gold-escort trooper, when I was but little older than poor Mary. The armed procession—the Dead March—the cap and sword on the coffin—seemed so imposing that I forthwith resolved to be a trooper myself. That ambition passed away;

Being a little too exalted for the men’s hut, and a great deal too vile for the boss’s house, I was quartered in the narangies’ barracks.

Social status, apart from all consideration of mind, manners, or even money, is more accurately weighed on a right-thinking Australian station than anywhere else in the world.

The folklore of Riverina is rich in variations of a mythus, pointing to the David-and-Goliath combat between a quiet wage-slave and a domineering squatter, in the brave days of old.

Something had gone wrong, as usual, this morning; and Mrs. Beaudesart remained in the narangies’ breakfast-room, mildly glowering into Ida’s tear-stained face, and noting with polite deprecation the convulsive sobs which the sensitive girl vainly tried to repress before the young fellows.

Beauty in distress is a favorite theme of your shallow romancists; but, to the philosophic mind, its pathos is nothing to that of ugliness in distress.

At the best of times, poor Ida was heartbreaking; her sunniest smile wrung my soul with commiseration; and when the sympathy naturally accorded to helpless anguish was superimposed upon that which she claimed as her birthright, the pressure became intolerable.

The fact is, that the Order of Things—rightly understood—is not susceptible of any coercion whatever, and must be humoured in every possible way.

In the race of life, my son, you must run cunning, reserving your sprint for the tactical moment.

Priestley ran bullheaded. In consequence of being always at work, he could get very little work done; and, being pursuantly in a chronic state of debt and destitution, he got only the work that intermittently slothful men wouldn’t take at the price.

there is only one; and you may trust an overclean man to be an authority on the evil effects of bathing, upon mind, body, and estate; just as the grogbibber is our highest authority on headaches, fantods, and bankruptcy.

The Spartans (so ran my reflections) were as much addicted to dirt as the Sybarites to cleanliness; and just compare the two communities.

The conquering races of later ages—Goths, Huns, Vandals, Longobards, etc.—were no less celebrated for one kind of grit than for the other. It is the Turkish bath that has made the once-formidable Ottoman Empire the sick man of Europe.

“Something I wanted to ask you, Collins,” he resumed; “but I’m beggared if I can think what it is. Slipped away like a snake, while you’re looking round for a stick.

Singular how a person can’t remember a thing for the life of them, when once they forget it; and suddenly it crops up of its own accord when you’re not thinking of it.

”

my own experience in bullock driving brings it home to me; and I sympathise with him, rather than with you. Of course the matter rests entirely in your hands; but to me it appears in the light of a responsibility.

It is noble to have a squatter’s strength, but tyrannous to use it like a squatter.

”

and to these he added a fatal self-consciousness. Don’t take me as saying that caste and culture could possibly have made him a boor; take me as saying that these had been powerless to avert the misfortune.

He was a gentleman by the grace of God and the flunkeyism of man.

Montgomery was also a gentleman, but only by virtue of his position. So that, for instance, Priestley’s personal facsimile, appearing as a well-to-do squatter, would have been received on equal terms by Montgomery; whereas, Folkestone’s disdain would have been scarcely lessened.

Just three words of comment here.

Built into the moral structure of each earthly probationer is a thermometer, graduated independently; and it is never safe to heat the individual to the boiling-point of his register.

You never know how far up the scale this point is, unless you are very familiar with the particular thermometer under experiment.

“When are you likely to see him again?” asked the boundary man. “But, of course, you can’t tell. It’s a foolish question. I don’t know what’s come over me tonight.”

Ignorance is bliss, in that instance, poor fellow! thought I, glancing out at the weirdly beautiful moonlight

; and I replied, “Most likely I’ll never see him again. These wool-tracks, that knew him so well, will know him no more again forever. He’s gone to a warmer climate.”

None. Euterpe alone of the Muses defies seduction.

Harmony is intrinsically chaste.

There is no secular music; all music is sacred. Whatever the song the Sirens sang, its music was pure; and no less pure were the notes which breathed from Nero’s lute, whilst the blaze of ten thousand homes glutted his Imperial lust for spectacle.

None. Euterpe alone of the Muses defies seduction. Harmony is intrinsically chaste.

There is no secular music; all music is sacred.

Whatever the song the Sirens sang, its music was pure; and no less pure were the notes which breathed from Nero’s lute, whilst the blaze of ten thousand homes glutted his Imperial lust for spectacle.

She proved a perfect fit when I “bent” her. I wore her afterward for many a week, till one night she rolled away from my camp, and I saw her no more, though I sought her diligently.

Take her for all in all, I shall not look upon her like again.

“Now, if you’d a pair o’ skylights athort your cutwater, you’d be set up for a professor of phrenology, or doxology, or any other ology,” suggested Jack, with one oath, two unseemly expletives, and two obscenities.

therefore, no Pierian spring, no tree of knowledge, thank you all the same. He is right enough as he is; the perpetual sabbath of absolute negation is good enough for him. His motto is, “

Happy the bird that has no history.

” Once a day, he experiences a crisp, triumphant appetite, which differs from hunger as melody differs from discord;

By that time, the bird beside him will have caught another fish; and though it be only—By my faith, he must wait longer; for the penguin, concluding that his own appetite will be more finely matured by another half-hour’s sleep, is just dozing off.

Woe for the man-o’-war hawk!

he must decide on something without delay, and he must do that something quickly—quickly—quickly—for there will be loafing enough in the grave, as the great American moralist says.

his thinking faculties should be so placed as to be in direct touch with the only thing that concerns him, namely, the saddle. Yet his heart must not be there; he must by no means be what the schoolboys call a “frightened beggar.”

Perfect horsemanship is usually the special accomplishment of the man who is not otherwise worth his salt, by reason of being too lazy for manual labour, and too slenderly upholstered on the mental side for anything else.

Sir Francis Head, one of the five exceptions to this rule—Gordon being the second, “Banjo” the third, “Glenrowan” the fourth, and the demurring reader the fifth—says the greatest art in riding is knowing how to fall.

However, you have stuck to him for a good solid sixty seconds; now, one of your knees has slipped over the pad, and your stirrup is swinging loose.

Good night, sweet prince.

And away circles the colt, slapping at the bit with his front feet, whilst your historic saddle shines in the sun, and the stirrup-irons occasionally meet high in the air. And away in chase go two of the chaps on their bits of stuff.