James Frazer Quotes

56 Sourced Quotes

Small minds cannot grasp great ideas; to their narrow comprehension, their purblind vision, nothing seems really great and important but themselves. Such minds hardly rise into religion at all.

James Frazer
The temple of the sylvan goddess, indeed, has vanished, and the King of the Wood no longer stands sentinel over the Golden Bough.

James Frazer
From the earliest times man has been engaged in a search for general rules whereby to turn the order of natural phenomena to his own advantage, and in the long search he has scraped together a great hoard of such maxims, some of them golden and some of them mere dross. The true or golden rules constitute the body of applied science which we call the arts; the false are magic.

James Frazer
It is for the philosophic student to trace the train of thought which underlies the magicians practice; to draw out the few simple threads of which the tangled skein is composed; to disengage the abstract principles from their concrete applications; in short, to discern the spurious science from the bastard art.

James Frazer
The consideration of human suffering is not one which enters into the calculations of primitive man.

James Frazer
The awe and dread with which the untutored savage contemplates his mother-in-law are amongst the most familiar facts of anthropology.

James Frazer
We must remember that at bottom the generalisations of science or, in common parlance, the laws of nature are merely hypotheses devised to explain that ever-shifting phantasmagoria of thought which we dignify with the high-sounding names of the world and the universe.

James Frazer
It is a common rule with primitive people not to waken a sleeper, because his soul is away and might not have time to get back; so if the man wakened without his soul, he would fall sick. If it is absolutely necessary to rouse a sleeper, it must be done very gradually, to allow the soul time to return.

James Frazer
The old notion that the savage is the freest of mankind is the reverse of the truth. He is a slave, not indeed to a visible master, but to the past, to the spirits of his dead forefathers, who haunt his steps from birth to death, and rule him with a rod of iron.

James Frazer
But once a fool always a fool, and the greater the power in his hands the more disastrous is likely to be the use he makes of it. The heaviest calamity in English history, the breach with America, might never have occurred if George the Third had not been an honest dullard.

James Frazer
I am a plain practical man, not one of your theorists and splitters of hairs and choppers of logic.

James Frazer
It is not a new opinion that the Golden Bough was the mistletoe. True, Virgil does not identify but only compares it with the mistletoe. But this may be only a poetical device to cast a mystic glamour over the humble plant.

James Frazer
Man has created gods in his own likeness and being himself mortal he has naturally supposed his creatures to be in the same sad predicament.

James Frazer
The world cannot live at the level of its great men.

James Frazer
The question whether our conscious personality survives after death has been answered by almost all races of men in the affirmative.

James Frazer
When all is said and done our resemblances to the savage are still far more numerous than our differences from him.

James Frazer
We seem to move on a thin crust which may at any moment be rent by the subterranean forces slumbering below.

James Frazer
For extending its sway, partly by force of arms, partly by the voluntary submission of weaker tribes, the community soon acquires wealth and slaves, both of which, by relieving some classes from the perpetual struggle for a bare subsistence, afford them an opportunity of devoting themselves to that disinterested pursuit of knowledge which is the noblest and most powerful instrument to ameliorate the lot of man.

James Frazer
Indeed the influence of music on the development of religion is a subject which would repay a sympathetic study.

James Frazer
Thus it comes about that the endeavour of primitive people to make a clean sweep of all their troubles generally takes the form of a grand hunting out and expulsion of devils and ghosts. They think that if they can only shake off these their accursed tormentors, they will make a fresh start in life, happy and innocent; the tales of Eden and the old poetic golden age will come true again.

James Frazer
The advance of knowledge is an infinite progression towards a goal that ever recedes.

James Frazer
With the advance of knowledge, therefore, prayer and sacrifice assume the leading place in religious ritual; and magic; which once ranked with them as a legitimate equal, is gradually relegated to the background and sinks to the level of a black art.

James Frazer
Imagination works upon man as really as does gravitation, and may kill him as certainly as a dose of prussic acid.

James Frazer
If any of my readers set out with the notion that that all races of men think and act much in the same way as educated Englishmen, the evidence of superstitious belief and custom collected in this work should suffice to disabuse him of so erroneous a prepossession.

James Frazer
Some of the old laws of Israel are clearly savage taboos of a familiar type thinly disguised as commands of the Deity.

James Frazer