Best 763 quotes in «australia quotes» category

The Greeks believed that it was a citizen's duty to watch a play. It was a kind of work in that it required attention, judgement, patience, all the social virtues." "And the Greek were conquered by the more practical Romans, Arthur." "Indeed, the Romans built their bridges, but they also spent many centuries wishing they were Greeks. And they, after all, were conquered by the barbarians, or by their own corrupt and small spirits.

The map? I will first make it.

The purpose of the research was to better understand all the stages Japanese international students encounter when studying abroad and to better ascertain their buyer behaviour when selecting foreign education

Then, as she turned in a majestic arc for home, a beautiful sunrise appeared on the horizon, as golden and perfect as the very first ray of sun at the beginning of time.

The problem is that after two centuries of conflict about just who was wanted in the Australian nation the term 'Australia' both includes and excludes. There are still people for whom 'Australian' means predominatly Anglo-Celtic white people whose parents were born here before 'New Australians' came as migrants after the Second World War. A common alternative to 'white people' (who from an Aboriginal perspective might be more genially called 'whitefellas') is 'Europeans'. This makes an incongruous appeal to history. Politically the colonisers were British, but they includes people of many nationalities. It's an odd usage, as when you see a sign in a national park telling you 'Europeans' brought the invasive weeds and pests. They brought the sign and the concept of a park too, and 'they', in a complex sense, are 'us'.

The purpose of water is to drink it but we swim in it for the fun of it.

There is a world of difference between city Australia and country Australia. It has nothing to do with wealth or education, nothing to do with Southern Cross tattoos and mullets, nothing to do with politics or income or class. It has everything to do with whether you know how to fix an engine, clean a rifle and birth a calf. Whether you know your neighbours. Whether you have enough foresight and pragmatism to convene a town meeting, throw a barricade up along the main road and strip refugees of their supplies.

There was one thing no one considered, however: Australia was populated by Australians. While the rest of us were trying to adapt to a world that suddenly seemed bent on eradicating the human race, the Australians had been dealing with a hostile environment for centuries. They looked upon our zombie apocalypse, and they were not impressed.

The stretch of Bruce Highway between Gin Gin and Miriam Vale was long and lonesome.

The secret magic of this country lay hidden, buried under buildings and blood; but it had never gone away, and it would never disappear. It lay waiting, lost in its own endless dream.

The study looks at the Japanese student market and aims to better understand it by concentrating on age and gender insights of the market to ascertain trends, awareness and key features that will allow marketers to appreciate and reach out to these customers

The very essence of Australia is our lack of sophistication–our refusal to conform to pretension and superficiality. We ought to be upholding our ‘fair-dinkumness’ and all the qualities so well documented in our folklore, the non-conformity of the swagman in Waltzing Matilda whose down to earth motto would I’m sure, have been ‘I’d rather be ignorant and fair dinkum than sophisticated and false’. Of course life has been a fight against ignorance, but the danger has always been that gaining knowledge rarely occurs without an increase in sophistication or falseness.

The two big cities of Australia are tonally as distinct from each other as Boston is from L.A. or Lyon from Marseilles.

To understand the Dreamtime, you must understand that we do not own the land. The land is our mother and she owns and nurtures us.

They were queen bitches and it seemed everyone and everything they knew and everyone and everything they didn't know deserved some kind of criticism.

Time is wasted on the young and experience is wasted on the old.

Too much negativity can make the strongest structures dilapidate.

Tracker Marks was of a different opinion. Though he seemed more white than a white man, he had no time for their ways. For him his dress, his deportment was no different than staying downwind in the shadows of trees when hunting, blending into the world of those he hunted, rather than standing out from it. Once he had excelled at the emu dance & the kangaroo dance; then his talent led him to the whitefella dance, only now no-one was left of his tribe to stand around the fire & laugh & praise his talent for observation & stealthy imitation. The whites have no law, he told Capois Death, no dreaming. Their way of life made no sense whatsoever. Still, he did not hate them or despise them. They were stupid beyond belief, but they had a power, & somehow their stupidity & their power were, in Tracker Marks’s mind, inextricably connected. But how? he asked Capois Death. How can power & ignorance sleep together? Questions to which Capois Death had no answer.

They had to be untrustworthy enough to buy a minor alcohol but trustworthy enough to not walk away with my money.

This is your chance. Are you going to cower and make excuses or are you going to do what you really want to do?

To survive one tragedy was to learn you cannot survive them all, and this knowledge was both a freedom and a great loss.

We human beings are story-tellers, we pass on our values through the stories we tell. This is particularly true of Catholics, who get their identity through their histories, which they see as salvation history linking them to the saving actions of Christ. So, for Catholics, doing history – passing on the values by telling stories – is a pastoral imperative. We must look where we have been in order to know where we are going.

We adapt to our sorrows, I suppose, as unpleasant as they might be. One cannot weep forever. One simply runs dry of tears.

We go around the room, introducing ourselves. 'I'm Hamza, I'm a friend of John's, I suppose,' he says a little reluctantly. Hamza tweeted recently that Muslims should not befriend the infidel. So I'm chuffed by his declaration. A bit like when a friend's cat hates everyone but you.

Vast skies in the Australian desert waves that don't move we slide surf glide like condors

We fall asleep as close as ears of wheat: chest to back, fingers entwined. I kiss the skin at the nape of her neck, soft like rabbit fur. I dream of nothing.

When you're in the safety of the future, the past doesn't seem so relevant.

We smoked the joints down to the roaches and then relaxed beneath the stars to let the drug form dazzling constellations.

What does a guy say to that? What does an inexperienced guy say to a beautiful, smart, proper girl who's not supposed to say things like that?

What is it that Australians celebrate on 26 January? Significantly, many of them are not quite sure what event they are commemorating. Their state of mind fascinated Egon Kisch, an inquisitive Czech who was in Sydney at the end of January 1935. Kisch has a place in our history as the victim, or hero, of a ludicrous chapter in the history of our immigration laws. He had been invited to Melbourne for a Congress against War and Fascism, and was forbidden to land by order of the attorney-general, R. G. Menzies. He had jumped overboard, broken his leg, gone to hospital, failed a dictation test in Gaelic and been sentenced to imprisonment and deportation. When the High Court declared Gaelic not a language, Kisch was free to hobble on our soil...

When Lillian (Holt) argues that leadership steals your spirit, she means that institutional pressures change you; they erode your courage, passion and humour and wear you down so that important things don't get named and get overtaken by the trivial. In the following excerpts from one interview I undertook with her, Lillian elaborates why Indigenous Australians find it hard to speak out. There is a systemic blockage. Something happens to Aboriginal people who work in hierarchies, whether bureaucracy or academic… a bit like my own story of climbing the ladder of success. You get to the top and find it bereft, bereft of passion, bereft of intuition, of emotion. 'For God's sake don't talk about emotion in a place like this!

When you look at it objectively, that’s what most colonists do—they land then find a way of wiping out their competition. In America is was blankets covered with smallpox and in Australia it was permits to hunt aborigines. If you wipe a whole people from the face of the earth, then there’s no one to point fingers at you. It’s just their spirits that haunt you and spirits can’t do shit.

When you think of somebody all the time it means one of two things - either you hate their guts or you like them a lot.

What does that quote mean to you? Can you explain the concept behind it and not just repeat the pretty phrase to me?

What makes this study different is that it studies Japanese cross-cultural adaptation by focusing on student success rather than student difficulties.

When after celebrating the Glory of the Grace of God we find way too much self congratulatory glory taking by a person who seem to need "More Acclaim" than he actually deserve and if there is way too self referencing involved in one's Christian ministry, then that can be indisputable sign of one's failing to recognize his Bias and own Spiritual Blindness. Such a person can never be Right or Honest with God no matter what he claims. One will be tempted to be less than honest about what's really going on in his heart and ministry. In the light of above premise we have to understand that the underlying danger is if one is too caught up in searching his own will then he will never find the secret of discovering God's divine will.

When an Italian marries a Greek, you get the union of two lots of people who believe themselves to be the creators of modern civilization

When I returned home soon afterwards, it was with a newly awakened sense of what Australian literature was good for: helping us define ourselves in relation to an Anglo past and American present, for example, or airing the wounds suffered by indigenous Australia, or inhabiting those new frictions that result from our expanding cultural pluralism. Above all, it could teach us to dwell more easily in a landscape that did not accord with the metaphors and myth-kitty that was our northern inheritance.

When this war is over we should raise a memorial in every Australian capital to the New Guinea natives so that we may never forget how much of the white man's burden was carried by the natives in this roadless jungle warfare ... so that we may remember how many Australians owe their lives to the natives who bore the wounded in their stretchers across the tortuous trail to safety.

When you travel by road in the west you travel with a cohort of dust which streams up from your tyres and rolls away in a disintegrating funnel, defining the currents of air your vehicle sets in motion … And the heat is unthinkable, no matter how widely the windows are open, and the sweat streams off your body and into your socks, and if there are a number of people in the car their body stenches mingle disagreeably

Where's your sense of misadventure?

While Australia is superficially referred to as a continental nation, upon closer scrutiny, it is in fact an archipelago.

Why are you so angry with your Duckling, harry? Don't you like it when I open my legs wide to you? Cross them over you - the way you like? What will you do when your little Duckling isn't there anymore to touch you with her soft fingertips, Harry, where you like it? First the left nipple and then the right. Your Duckling doesn't want to leave you, Harry." "Duckling..." "I need freedom sometimes, Harry.

You big ugly. You too empty. You desert with your nothing nothing nothing. You scorched suntanned. Old too quickly. Acres of suburbs watching the telly. You bore me. Freckle silly children. You nothing much. With your big sea. Beach beach beach. I’ve seen enough already. You dumb dirty city with bar stools. You’re ugly. You silly shopping town. You copy. You too far everywhere. You laugh at me. When I came this woman gave me a box of biscuits. You try to be friendly but you’re not very friendly. You never ask me to your house. You insult me. You don’t know how to be with me. Road road tree tree. I came from crowded and many. I came from rich. You have nothing to offer. You’re poor and spread thin. You big. So what. I’m small. It’s what’s in. You silent on Sunday. Nobody on your streets. You dead at night. You go to sleep too early. You don’t excite me. You scare me with your hopeless. Asleep when you walk. Too hot to think. You big awful. You don’t match me. You burnt out. You too big sky. You make me a dot in the nowhere. You laugh with your big healthy. You want everyone to be the same. You’re dumb. You do like anybody else. You engaged Doreen. You big cow. You average average. Cold day at school playing around at lunchtime. Running around for nothing. You never accept me. For your own. You always ask me where I’m from. You always ask me. You tell me I look strange. Different. You don’t adopt me. You laugh at the way I speak. You think you’re better than me. You don’t like me. You don’t have any interest in another country. Idiot centre of your own self. You think the rest of the world walks around without shoes or electric light. You don’t go anywhere. You stay at home. You like one another. You go crazy on Saturday night. You get drunk. You don’t like me and you don’t like women. You put your arm around men in bars. You’re rough. I can’t speak to you. You burly burly. You’re just silly to me. You big man. Poor with all your money. You ugly furniture. You ugly house. You relaxed in your summer stupor. All year. Never fully awake. Dull at school. Wait for other people to tell you what to do. Follow the leader. Can’t imagine. Workhorse. Thick legs. You go to work in the morning. You shiver on a tram.

Would I come off as a creepy-stalker-kind-of-guy or would it demonstrate that I cared?

You are totally at the mercy of nature in this country, mate. It's just a fact of life.

You know what's the worst? Having realistic, ordinary expectations taken out of your reach by seemingly unrealistic, extraordinary circumstances.

You cannot imagine, to give you another example, that you may have, one day, a prime minister (it would go against my modesty to breathe his name) who, one day, after announcing in Parliament, in a cool, impassive voice, that, as the result of a number of carefully thought out diplomatic manoeuvres he has refrained from discussing before (for he is not a man of many words), he has succeeded in annexing Britain as an ordinary colony of Hungary, and that he is taking this opportunity to apprise the House of the fact; - Well, as I say, after explaining this in a cool and impassive tone, ignoring the shouting, jubilant Members who want to carry him round on their shoulders, suddenly he takes up a fencing posture and, right there, on the premier's rostrum, employing a formidable, hitherto unknown jujitsu hold, floors the Australian world wrestling champion whom the British opposition treacherously hid under the rostrum in order to assassinate the greatest European.

You didn't always have to give it back. And in that cold, somber chapel, Dan Kelly discovered that there were some things that you could not be forgiven for, and those were the things that you carried into the next life, if there was such a place; and if there was no next life nor any God, the consequence was the same: if you were not forgiven, you would die with regret.

You live by whatever rules you need to govern your life the best you think. Let's just try not to encroach.