Top 90 James Anthony Froude Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “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.”

— James Anthony Froude

52. “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.”

— James Anthony Froude

53. “We live merely on the crust or rind of things.”

— James Anthony Froude

54. “No person is ever good for much, that hasn’t been swept off their feet by enthusiasm between ages twenty and thirty.”

— James Anthony Froude

55. “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.”

— James Anthony Froude

56. “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.”

— James Anthony Froude

57. “The superstition of science scoffs at the superstition of faith.”

— James Anthony Froude

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

— James Anthony Froude

59. “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.”

— James Anthony Froude

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

— James Anthony Froude

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

— James Anthony Froude

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

— James Anthony Froude

63. “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.”

— James Anthony Froude

64. “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.”

— James Anthony Froude

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

— James Anthony Froude

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

— James Anthony Froude

67. “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.”

— James Anthony Froude

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

— James Anthony Froude

69. “Human improvement is from within outward.”

— James Anthony Froude

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

— James Anthony Froude

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

— James Anthony Froude

72. “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.”

— James Anthony Froude

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

— James Anthony Froude

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

— James Anthony Froude

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

— James Anthony Froude

76. “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.”

— James Anthony Froude

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

— James Anthony Froude

78. “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.”

— James Anthony Froude

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

— James Anthony Froude

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

— James Anthony Froude

81. “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.”

— James Anthony Froude

82. “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.”

— James Anthony Froude

83. “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.”

— James Anthony Froude

84. “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.”

— James Anthony Froude

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

— James Anthony Froude

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

— James Anthony Froude

87. “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.”

— James Anthony Froude

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

— James Anthony Froude

89. “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.”

— James Anthony Froude

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

— James Anthony Froude

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

— James Anthony Froude

92. “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.”

— James Anthony Froude

93. “It often seems to me as if History was like a child’s box of letters, with which we can spell any word we please. We have only to pick out such letters as we want, arrange them as we like, and say nothing about those which do not suit our purpose.”

— James Anthony Froude

94. “Opinions alter, manners change, creeds rise and fall, but the moral law is written on the tablets of eternity. For every false word or unrighteous deed, for cruelty and oppression, for lust or vanity, the price has to be paid at last.”

— James Anthony Froude

95. “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.”

— James Anthony Froude