James Anthony Froude - Short studies on great subjects (1864)

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

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

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
These are facts which no casuistry can explain away.

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

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

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

James Anthony Froude
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.

James Anthony Froude
Time has no relation to Being, conceived mathematically; it would be absurd to speak of circles or triangles as any older today than they were at the beginning of the world.

James Anthony Froude
The necessitarian falls back upon the experienced reality of facts.

James Anthony Froude
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
Crime is not punished as an offense against God, but as prejudicial to society.

James Anthony Froude
The secrets of nature have been opened out to us on a thousand lines; and men of science of all creeds can pursue side by side their common investigations.

James Anthony Froude
No vehement error can exist in this world with impunity...

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

James Anthony Froude
Just laws are no restraint upon the freedom of the good, for the good man desires nothing which a just law will interfere with.

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

James Anthony Froude
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.

James Anthony Froude
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.

James Anthony Froude
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
The superstition of science scoffs at the superstition of faith.

James Anthony Froude
We may make our own opinions, but facts were made for us; and, if we evade or deny them, it will be the worse for us.

James Anthony Froude
Every one of us, whatever our speculative opinions, knows better than he practices, and recognizes a better law than he obeys.

James Anthony Froude