Norman Lindsay Quotes

The best love affairs are those we never had.

O, who would be a puddin', A puddin' in a pot,
A puddin' which is stood on A fire which is hot?
O sad indeed the lot
Of puddin's in a pot.

I never indulge sentiment over broken friendships. We have extracted all we need from a friend, and so get rid of him on the same terms as he gets rid of us.

One was a Possum, with one of those sharp, snooting, snouting sort of faces, and the other was a bulbous, boozy-looking Wombat in an old long-tailed coat, and a hat that marked him down as a man you couldn't trust in the fowl-yard.

A writer who presents men and women as creatures truncated below the waist is exposed as one who goes about without his trousers saying, 'see, I have had my testicles removed.'

Oh, rolling round the ocean, From a far and foreign land,
May suit the common notion That a sailor's life is grand.But as for me, I'd sooner be A roaring here at home
About the rolling, roaring life Of them that sails the foam.For the homeward-bounder's chorus, Which he roars across the foam,
Is all about chucking a sailor's life, And settling down at home.Home, home, home, That's the song of them that roam,
The song of the roaring, rolling sea Is all about rolling home.

The efforts of all common humanity are directed to one end — to make existence less difficult. To this end those rules of conduct that pass for morality also tend.

I am fanatic enough to believe that my thought is something the world needs.

Bill, of course, treated this conduct with silent contempt. It was his rule through life, he said, never to fight people with beaks.

If there is any man today who believes that the object of the eternal struggle for existence will evolve a higher type, an aristocracy of class, nation or race, that man has failed to read the history of mankind. In other words, he is a hopeless optimist.

If anyone assumes that going one's own way is the easy way, they are very much in error. There's no harder way to go.

Whiskers alone are bad enough
Attached to faces coarse and rough
But how much greater their offence is
When stuck on Uncles' countenances

[N]o statement of a value in Art can have authority till the Art itself has forced that valuation on Life.

Don't you know that nothin' gives a man greater remorse than havin' his face punched, his toes trod on, and eggs rubbed in his hair?

They were a bloodthirsty lot, those sentimentalists who wept for the sad lot of the working classes.