James Anthony Froude Quotes

Men are made by nature unequal. It is vain, therefore, to treat them as if they were equal.

Philosophy goes no further than probabilities, and in every assertion keeps a doubt in reserve.

I could never fear a God who kept a hell prison-house. No, not though he flung me there because I refused. There is a power stronger than such a one; and it is possible to walk unscathed even in the burning furnace.

It remains a lesson to all time, that goodness, though the indispensable adjunct to knowledge, is no substitute for it; that when conscience undertakes to dictate beyond its province, the result is only the more monstrous.

We enter the world alone, we leave the world alone.

A single seed of fact will produce in a season or two a harvest of calumnies; but sensible men will pay no attention to them.

Instead of man to love, we have a man-god to worship . From being the example of devotion, he is its object; the religion of Christ ended with his life , and left us instead but the Christian religion.

We cannot live on probabilities. The faith in which we can live bravely and die in peace must be a certainty, so far as it professes to be a faith at all, or it is nothing.

Beautiful is old age - beautiful as the slow-dropping mellow autumn of a rich glorious summer. In the old man, Nature has fulfilled her work; she loads him with blessings; she fills him with the fruits of a well-spent life; and, surrounded by his children and his children's children, she rocks him softly away to a grave, to which he is followed with blessings. God forbid we should not call it beautiful.

Thirst of power and of riches now bear sway,
The passion and infirmity of age.

Justice without wisdom is impossible.

The endurance of the inequalities of life by the poor is the marvel of human society.

Do you not think that sometimes when matters are at the worst with us, when we appear to have done all which we ourselves can do, yet all has been unavailing, and we have only shown we cannot, not we will not, help ourselves; that often just then something comes, almost as if supernaturally, to settle for us, as if our guardian angel took pity on our perplexities, and then at last obtained leave to help us? And if it be so, then what might only be a coincidence becomes a call of Providence, a voice from Heaven, a command.

I cut a hole in my heart and wrote with the blood .

Just laws are no restraint upon the freedom of the good, for the good man desires nothing which a just law will interfere with.

We must have the real thing before we can have a science of a thing.

Carelessness is inexcusable, and merits the inevitable sequence.

Science rests on reason and experiment, and can meet an opponent with calmness; but a belief is always sensitive.

Woe to the unlucky man who as a child is taught, even as a portion of his creed, what his grown reason must forswear.

The best that we can do for one another is to exchange our thoughts freely; and that, after all, is about all.

The essence of greatness is neglect of the self.

Those who seek for something more than happiness in this world must not complain if happiness is not their portion.

Human improvement is from within outward.

Ignorance is the dominion of absurdity.

Crime is not punished as an offense against God, but as prejudicial to society.

Man is a real man, and can live and act manfully in this world, not in the strength of opinions, not according to what he thinks, but according to what he is .

Life is change, to cease to change is to cease to live; yet if you may shed a tear beside the death-bed of an old friend, let not your heart be silent on the dissolving of a faith.

I think there is a spiritual scent in us which feels mischief coming, as they say birds scent storms.

We are complex, and therefore, in our natural state, inconsistent, beings, and the opinion of this hour need not be the opinion of the next.

Who shall say that those poor peasants were not acting in the spirit we most venerate, most adore; that theirs was not the true heart language which we cannot choose but love? And what has been their reward? They have sent down their name to be the by-word of all after ages; the worst reproach of the worst men a name convertible with atheism and devil-worship.

Age does not make us childish, as some say; it finds us true children.

Nature is not a partisan, but out of her ample treasue house she produces children in infinite variety, of which she is equally the mother, and disowns none of them ...

To be happy is not the purpose for which you are placed in this world.

To deny the freedom of the will is to make morality impossible.

You cannot reason people into loving those whom they are not drawn to love; they cannot reason themselves into it; and there are some contrarieties of temper which are too strong even for the obligations of relationship.

Wild animals never kill for sport. Man is the only one to whom the torture and death of his fellow creatures is amusing in itself.

I think Nature, if she interests herself much about her children, must often feel that, like the miserable Frankenstein, with her experimenting among the elements of humanity, she has brought beings into existence who have no business here; who can do none of her work, and endure none of her favours; whose life is only suffering; and whose action is one long protest against the ill foresight which flung them into consciousness.

In every department of life
in its business and in its pleasures, in its beliefs and in its theories, in its material developments and in its spiritual connections
we thank God that we are not like our fathers.

That in these times every serious person should not in his heart have felt some difliculty with the doctrines of the incarnation, I cannot helieve. We are not as we were. When Christianity was first published, the imagination of mankind presented the relation of heaven to earth very differently from what it does now.

A dreamer he was, and ever would be. Yet dreaming need not injure us, if it do but take its turn with waking; and even dreams themselves may be turned to beauty, by favoured men to whom nature has given the powers of casting them into form.

The better one is morally the less aware they are of their virtue.

Mistakes are often the best teachers.

Life is more than a theory, and love of truth butters no bread: old men who have had to struggle along their way, who know the endless bitterness, the grave moral deterioration which follow an empty exchequer, may well be pardoned for an over-wish to see their sons secured from it; hunger, at least, is a reality ...

The superstition of science scoffs at the superstition of faith.

Fling away your soul once for all, your own small self; if you will find it again. Count not even on immortality.

Courage is, on all hands, considered as an essential of high character.

The Providence that watches over the affairs of men works out of their mistakes, at times, a healthier issue than could have been accomplished by their wisest forethought.

It is ill changing the creed to meet each rising temptation. The soul is truer than it seems, and refuses to be trifled with.

The essence of true nobility is neglect of self. Let the thought of self pass in, and the beauty of a great action is gone, like the bloom from a soiled flower.

True greatness is the most ready to recognize and most willing to obey those simple outward laws which have been sanctioned by the experience of mankind.

The moral of human life is never simple, and the moral of a story which aims only at being true to human life cannot be expected to be any more so.

Nature is less partial than she appears, and all situations in life have their compensations along with them.

Now, to a single-minded man, who is either brave enough or reckless enough to surrender himself wholly to one idea, and look neither right nor left, but only forward, what earthly consequences may follow is not material. Persecution strengthens him; and so he is sure he is right, whether his course end in a prison or on a throne is no matter at all. But men of this calibre are uncommon in any age or in any country very uncommon in this age and this country.

That which especially distinguishes a high order of man from a low order of man, that which constitutes human goodness, human nobleness, is surely not the degree of enlightenment with which men pursue their own advantage; but it is self-forgetfulness; it is self-sacrifice; it is the disregard of personal pleasure, personal indulgence, personal advantage, remote or present, because some other line of conduct is more right.

We read the past by the light of the present, and the forms vary as the shadows fall, or as the point of vision alters.

There is always a part of our being into which those who are dearer to us far than our own lives are yet unable to enter.

We live merely on the crust or rind of things.

The first duty of an historian is to be on guard against his own sympathies.

Instruction does not prevent wasted time or mistakes; and mistakes themselves are often the best teachers of all.

Superior strength is found in the long run to lie with those who had right on their side.

I believe that fallen creatures perish, perish for ever, for only good can live, and good has not been theirs; but how durst men forge our Saviour's words "eternal death " into so horrible a meaning? And even if he did use other words, and seem to countenance such a meaning for them (and what witness have we that He did, except that of men whose ignorance or prejudice might well have interpreted these words wrongly as they did so many others?

In everyday things the law of sacrifice takes the form of positive duty.

I would sooner perish for ever than stoop down before a Being who may have power to crush me, but whom my heart forbids me to reverence.

Experience teaches slowly, and at the cost of mistakes.

English character and English freedom depend comparatively little on the form which the Constitution assumes at Westminster. A centralised democracy may be as tyrannical as an absolute monarch; and if the vigour of the nation is to continue unimpaired, each individual, each family, each district, must preserve as far as possible its independence, its self-completeness, its powers and its privilege to manage its own affairs and think its own thoughts.

We call heaven our home, as the best name we know to give it.

The solitary side of our nature demands leisure for reflection upon subjects on which the dash and whirl of daily business, so long as its clouds rise thick about us, forbid the intellect to fasten itself.

Minds vary in sensitiveness and in self-power, as bodies do in susceptibility of attraction and repulsion. When, when shall we learn that they are governed by laws as inexorable as physical laws, and that a man can as easily refuse to obey what has power over him as a steel atom can resist the magnet?

The moral system of the universe is like a document written in alternate ciphers, which change from line to line.

The war of good and evil is mightiest in mightiest souls, and even in the darkest time the heart will maintain its right against the hardest creed.

There are at bottom but two possible religions
that which rises in the moral nature of man, and which takes shape in moral commandments, and that which grows out of the observation of the material energies which operate in the external universe.

Morality rests upon a sense of obligation; and obligation has no meaning except as implying a Divine command, without which it would cease to be.

I cannot think the disputes and jealousies of Heaven are tried and settled by the swords of earth.

Women's eyes are rapid in detecting a heart which is ill at ease with itself, and, knowing the value of sympathy, and finding their own greatest happiness not in receiving it, but in giving it, with them to be unhappy is at once to be interesting.

I believe in God, not because the Bible tells me that he is, but because my heart tells me so; and the same heart tells me we can only have His peace with us if we love Him and obey Him, and that we can only he happy when we each love our neighbour better than ourselves.

Morality, when vigorously alive, sees farther than intellect, and provides unconsciously for intellectual difficulties.

Where nature is sovereign, there is no need of austerity and self-denial.

The practical effect of a belief is the real test of its soundness.