James Anthony Froude Quotations

The essence of greatness is neglect of the self.

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

The secret of a person's nature lies in their religion and what they really believes about the world and their place in it.

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.

You cannot dream yourself into a character; you must hammer and forge yourself one.

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

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

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

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

A person possessed with an idea cannot be reasoned with.

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

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

Experience teaches slowly, and at the cost of mistakes.

As we advance in life, we learn the limits of our abilities.

No person is ever good for much, that hasn't been swept off their feet by enthusiasm between ages twenty and thirty

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

Once, once for all, if you would save your heart from breaking, learn this lesson once for all you must cease, in this world, to believe in the eternity of any creed or form at all. Whatever grows in time is a child of time, and is born and lives, and dies at its appointed day like ourselves.

Charity is from person to person; and it loses half, far more than half, its moral value when the giver is not brought into personal relation with those to whom he gives.

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?

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.

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

Look not to have your sepulchre built in after ages hy the same foolish hands which still ever destroy the living prophet. Small honour for you if they do build it; and may be they never will build it.

For me this world was neither so high nor so low as the Church would have it; chequered over with its wild light shadows, I could love it and all the children of it, more dearly, perhaps, because it was not all light.

Experience is no more transferable in morals than in art.

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.

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

I scarcely know a professional man I can like, and certainly not one who has been what the world calls successful, that I should the least wish to resemble.

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.

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.

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.

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...

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?

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 .

We live merely on the crust or rind of things.

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...

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

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.

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

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.

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

If you think you can temper yourself into manliness by sitting here over your books, it is the very silliest fancy that ever tempted a young man to his ruin. You cannot dream yourself into a character; you must hammer and forge yourself one.

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

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.

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 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.

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.

I have long been convinced that the Christian Eucharist is but a continuation of the Eleusinian mysteries. St Paul, in using the word teleiois, almost confirms this.

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.

High original genius is always ridiculed on its first appearance; most of all by those who have won themselves the highest reputation in working on the established lines. Genius only commands recognition when it has created the taste which is to appreciate it.

Men think to mend their condition by a change of circumstances. They might as well hope to escape from their shadows.

What is right or duty without power ? To tell a man it is his duty to submit his judgment to the judgment of the church, is like telling a wife it is her duty to love her husband a thing easy to say, but meaning simply nothing. Affection must be won, not commanded.

It may be from some moral obliquity in myself, or from some strange disease; but for me, and I should think too for every human being in whose breast a human heart is beating, to know that one single creature is in that dreadful place would make a hell of heaven itself. And they have hearts in heaven, for they love there.

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.

Where all are selfish, the sage is no better than the fool, and only rather more dangerous.

Our thoughts and our conduct are our own.

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.

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 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.

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

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

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.

Justice without wisdom is impossible.

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.

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

What is called virtue in the common sense of the word has nothing to do with this or that man's prosperity, or even happiness.

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

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.

Sacrifice is the first element of religion, and resolves itself in theological language into the love of God.

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.

Our human laws are but the copies, more or less imperfect, of the eternal laws, so far as we can read them.

The practical effect of a belief is the real test of its soundness. Where we find a heroic life appearing as the uniform fruit of a particular mode of opinion, it is childish to argue in the face of fact that the result ought to have been different.

Truth only smells sweet forever, and illusions, however innocent, are deadly as the canker worm.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

To tell men that they cannot help themselves is to fling them into recklessness and despair.

Carelessness is inexcusable, and merits the inevitable sequence.

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.

I have nothing but myself to write about, no facts, no theories, no opinions, no adventures, no sentiments, nothing but my own poor barren individualism, of considerable interest to me, but I do not know why I should presume it will be so to you. Egotism is not tiresome, or it ought not to be, if one is sincere about oneself; but it is so hard to be sincere. Well, never mind, I mean to be, and you know me well enough to see through me when I am humbugging.

Thy plain and open nature sees mankind But in appearance, not what they are.

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.

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

To be enthusiastic about doing much with human nature is a foolish business indeed; and, throwing himself into his work as he was doing, and expecting so much from it, would not the tide ebb as strongly as it was flowing? It is a rash game this setting our hearts on any future beyond what we have our own selves control over. Things do not walk as we settle with ourselves they ought to walk, and to hope is almost the correlative of to be disappointed.

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

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