John Masefield: The three great comforters: art, alcohol, religion

Charles KIngsley: the opium of the people

Rabelais: le grand peut-être = the great maybe

Mozart: wrote The Magic Flute and The Requiem in the same year

Heraclitus: To God all things are fair and good and right but men hold some things wrong and some right.

Thomas Carlyle on Voltaire: One of the dry souls of the Enlightenment

Manning Clark: A Man should write about things that matter

Emile Bronte: for a lover the universe could never turn to a mighty stranger

the price of liberty is eternal vigilance

Mallarmé:   The sea is sad, alas,

And I have read all the books.

Be correct..for being correct is a measure of a man’s virtues

Alexis De Tocqueville: L’Ancien Régime et la Révolution: “the field of the possible is much more vast than those who live in a particular era generally conceive.”

Melville: Ghastly countries produce ghastly theologies

W E Housman: (wrote A Shropshire Lad): it rains into the sea, but still the sea is salt 

Adam:  England is a nation of shopkeepers (stolen by Napoleon)

Ortega y Gassett: Can high culture survive in the age of the masses?

De Tocquville: Can there be historian in a democratic society?  The great mass of mankind had un gout depravé for equality. To satisfy their hunger for material well-being (their earthly not their heavenly bread) and for this taste for equality, human beings would hand over their freedom to someone they loved to worship. Only the great and strong love and cherished liberty, the ones who hungered for ‘heavenly bread’.

Mac Crawford: Historians do not give answers; they just ask questions

Marx: All previous philosophers have assumed that their task was to describe the world ; the duty of the philosopher is to change the world

Manning Clark: 1939: I believed then we could all be changed. Now I am not so sure whether we can be changed. I still believe in a change in society, but not a change in the human heart, because that can never be. Why should a lover change the beloved?

Browning: “Oh to be in England, now that April’s here.

Pater on the Mona Lisa: She is older than the rocks among which she sits

Manning Clark: It is a contradiction about Australians that we boasted of ourselves as democratic and egalitarian yet accepted a tyranny of opinion.

Omar Khayyam:

Myself when young did eagerly frequent

Doctor and saint and heard great argument

Around it and about; but evermore

Came out by the same door as I went in.

Freud: Never reply to criticism- the only way to reply to criticism is to write another work

James McAuley a disappointed radical.

Emerson: The vision by which we hoped to guide our lives would be obscured all too often by our own follies, weaknesses and madnesses.

E M Forster: Our civilization recommends ideals and practises

brutality.

Henry Lawson: from a poem: the old dead tree and the young tree green [contrasting England and Australia]

Kolynos Smile = toothpaste advertisement smile (Kolynos was a major toothpaste company prior to Colgate)

John Ruskin: Betrayal is one of the principal manifestations of human evil. The great mass of humanity cannot live with good or innocent people.

Manning on Geoffrey Searl’s biography of Monash: fair-minded and judicious

Manning Clark: Man is broad, far broader than his portrait, as painted by the self-appointed improvers of humanity.

Manning on Tolstoy: encouraged others to think about the things that really mattered.

Hindu aphorism: the roots of the Lotus flower feed on the slime