Frances Power Cobbe Quotes

23 Sourced Quotes

Morality may exist in an atheist without any religion, and in a theist with a religion quite unspiritual.

Frances Power Cobbe
Then the Sorcerer Science entered, and where e'er he waved his wand Fresh wonders and fresh mysteries rose on every hand.

Frances Power Cobbe
By some strange and sinister fatality the chosen victims at present are the most intelligent and friendly of our domestic favourites—the cats who purr in love and confidence as they sit beside us on the hearth; the dogs whose faithful hearts glow with an affection for us, truer and fonder than we may easily find in any human breast.

Frances Power Cobbe
Science... is but a mere heap of facts, not a golden chain of truths, if we refuse to link it to the throne of God.

Frances Power Cobbe
Every system of law is a system of education, and, in extending legal sanction to the scientific torture of animals, the State educates the nation in a false view of the relations of man to the lower creatures, encourages selfishness and cruelty and the disregard of the rights of the weak by the strong.

Frances Power Cobbe
He who does most to cure woman of her weakness, her frivolity, and her servility will likewise at the same stroke do most to cure man of his brutality, his selfishness and his sensuality.

Frances Power Cobbe
I could not bear it did I not believe in another life for the poor harmless victims where their wrongs will be recompensed, & I may add also in another life for their inhuman persecutors where they will all repent in moral agony worse than the physical pain of their poor victims.

Frances Power Cobbe
I think it is worse to be poor in mind than in purse, to be stunted and belittled in soul, made a coward, made a liar, made mean and slavish, accustomed to fawn and prevaricate, and "manage" by base arts a husband or a father,--I think this is worse than to be kicked with hobnailed shoes.

Frances Power Cobbe
Men give us most rarely that which we really want, not favor, but - Justice. Nothing is easier than to coax them to pet us like children, nothing more difficult than to persuade them to treat us like responsible human beings.

Frances Power Cobbe
We women have before us the noblest end to which a finite creature may attain; and our duty is nothing else than the fulfilment of the whole moral law, the attainment of every human virtue.

Frances Power Cobbe
The time comes to every dog when it ceases to care for people merely for biscuits or bones, or even for caresses, and walks out of doors. When a dog really loves, it prefers the person who gives it nothing, and perhaps is too ill ever to take it out for exercise, to all the liberal cooks and active dog-boys in the world.

Frances Power Cobbe
As the main work of civilisation has been the vindication of the rights of the weak, it is not too much, I think, to insist that the practice of Vivisection in which this tyranny of strength culminates is a retrograde step in the progress of our race—a backwater in the onward flowing stream of justice and mercy, no less portentous than deplorable.

Frances Power Cobbe
My great panacea for making society at once better and more enjoyable would be to cultivate greater sincerity.

Frances Power Cobbe
I have often thought how strange it is that men can at once and the same moment cheerfully consign our sex to lives either of narrowest toil or senseless luxury and vanity, and then sneer at the smallness of our aims, the pettiness of our thoughts, the puerility of our conversation!

Frances Power Cobbe
Our sex bears the disgrace not only of a great deal of genuine poltroonery, but also of much which is mere affectation.

Frances Power Cobbe
Love naturally reverses the idea of obedience, and causes the struggle between any two who truly love each other to be, not who shall command, but who shall yield.

Frances Power Cobbe
If a woman be herself pure and noble-hearted, she will come into every circle as a person does into a heated room, who carries with him the freshness of the woods where he has been walking.

Frances Power Cobbe
Ours is the old, old story of every uprising race or class or order. The work of elevation must be wrought by ourselves or not at all.

Frances Power Cobbe
I think that every woman who has any margin of time or money to spare should adopt some one public interest, some philanthropic undertaking, or some social agitation of reform, and give to that cause whatever time and work she may be able to afford; thus completing her life by adding to her private duties the noble effort to advance God's Kingdom beyond the bounds of her home.

Frances Power Cobbe
Every woman who has any margin of time or money to spare should adopt some one public interest, some philanthropic undertaking,or some social agitation of reform, and give to that cause whatever time and work she may be able to afford...

Frances Power Cobbe
It is a woman, and only a woman, — a woman all by herself, if she likes, and without any man to help her, — who can turn a house into a home.

Frances Power Cobbe
I could discern clearly, even at that early age, the essential difference between people who are kind to dogs and people who really love them.

Frances Power Cobbe
It cannot surely be questioned but that we want a System of Morals better than any of those which are current amongst us.

Frances Power Cobbe