Top 120 Quotes & Sayings by James Anthony Froude
Explore popular quotes and sayings by an English novelist James Anthony Froude.
Last updated on September 18, 2024.
Instruction does not prevent wasted time or mistakes; and mistakes themselves are often the best teachers of all.
The endurance of the inequalities of life by the poor is the marvel of human society.
Human improvement is from within outward.
The essence of greatness is neglect of the self.
Experience teaches slowly, and at the cost of mistakes.
Age does not make us childish, as some say; it finds us true children.
A person possessed with an idea cannot be reasoned with.
Fear is the parent of cruelty.
You cannot dream yourself into a character; you must hammer and forge yourself one.
As we advance in life, we learn the limits of our abilities.
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.
No person is ever good for much, that hasn't been swept off their feet by enthusiasm between ages twenty and thirty.
The first duty of an historian is to be on guard against his own sympathies.
To deny the freedom of the will is to make morality impossible.
The practical effect of a belief is the real test of its soundness.
We enter the world alone, we leave the world alone.
The better one is morally the less aware they are of their virtue.
The secret of a person's nature lies in their religion and what they really believes about the world and their place in it.
Science rests on reason and experiment, and can meet an opponent with calmness; but a belief is always sensitive.
In everyday things the law of sacrifice takes the form of positive duty.
Superior strength is found in the long run to lie with those who had right on their side.
Philosophy goes no further than probabilities, and in every assertion keeps a doubt in reserve.
Men are made by nature unequal. It is vain, therefore, to treat them as if they were equal.
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.
Ignorance is the dominion of absurdity.
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.
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.
Of all the evil spirits abroad at this hour in the world, insincerity is the most dangerous.
The soul of man is not a thing which comes and goes, is builded and decays like the elemental frame in which it is set to dwell, but a very living force, a very energy of God's organic will, which rules and moulds this universe.
To be happy is not the purpose for which you are placed in this world.
Scepticism, like wisdom, springs out in full panoply only from the brain of a god, and it is little profit to see an idea in its growth, unless we track its seed to the power which sowed it.
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.
We enter the world alone, we leave it alone.
When a woman's heart is flowing over for the first time with deep and passionate love, she is all love. Every faculty of her soul rushes together in the intensity of the one feeling; thought, reflection, conscience, duty, the past, the future, they are names to her light as the breath which speaks them; her soul is full.
Morality, when vigorously alive, sees farther than intellect, and provides unconsciously for intellectual difficulties.
Those who seek for something more than happiness in this world must not complain if happiness is not their portion.
Justice without wisdom is impossible.
Where all are selfish, the sage is no better than the fool, and only rather more dangerous.
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.
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.
I am convinced with Plato , with St. Paul, with St. Augustine, with Calvin , and with Leibnitz, that this universe, and every smallest portion of it, exactly fulfils the purpose for which Almighty God designed it.
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.
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.
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.
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.
To tell men that they cannot help themselves is to fling them into recklessness and despair.
Every one of us ... knows better than he practices, and recognizes a better law than he obeys.
Truth only smells sweet forever, and illusions, however innocent, are deadly as the canker worm.
Men think to mend their condition by a change of circumstances. They might as well hope to escape from their shadows.
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.
Just laws are no restraint upon the freedom of the good, for the good man desires nothing which a just law will interfere with.
The first duty of an historian is to be on his guard against his own sympathies...
We call heaven our home, as the best name we know to give it.
Fling away your soul once for all, your own small self; if you will find it again. Count not even on immortality.
Carelessness is inexcusable, and merits the inevitable sequence.
History is a voice forever sounding across the centuries the laws of right and wrong. Opinions alter, manners change, creeds rise and fall, but the moral law is written on the tablets of eternity.
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.
The trials of life will not wait for us. They come at their own time, not caring much to inquire how ready we may be to meet them.
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.
The best that we can do for one another is to exchange our thoughts freely; and that, after all, is about all.
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