James Anthony Froude Quotes

123 Sourced Quotes

Facts can be accurately known to us only by the most rigid observation and sustained and scrutinizing skepticism.

James Anthony Froude
My friends at Rhodes made me so. I cost as much as sixteen gold gods of average size.

James Anthony Froude
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
There are epidemics of nobleness as well as epidemics of disease.

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

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

James Anthony Froude
Superstition, hero worship, ignorance of the laws of probability, religious, political, or speculative prejudice. One or other of these has tended from the beginning to give us distorted pictures.

James Anthony Froude
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.

James Anthony Froude
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.

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

James Anthony Froude
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.

James Anthony Froude
These are facts which no casuistry can explain away.

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

James Anthony Froude
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
Large forms resolve themselves into parts, down so far as we can see into infinity.

James Anthony Froude
We have to consider the million, not the units; the average, not the exceptions.

James Anthony Froude
Unfortunately, the average of one generation need not be the average of the next.

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

James Anthony Froude
It is through a conviction of the inadequacy of all formulas to cover the facts of nature, it is by a constant recollection of the fallibility of the best instructed intelligence, and by an unintermittent skepticism which goes out of its way to look for difficulties, that scientific progress has been made possible.

James Anthony Froude
The superstitions of science scoff at the superstitions of faith.

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

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

James Anthony Froude
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.

James Anthony Froude
Of all the evil spirits abroad at this hour in the world, insincerity is the most dangerous.

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

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

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

James Anthony Froude