James Frazer - Man Quotes

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

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
Dwellers by the sea cannot fail to be impressed by the sight of its ceaseless ebb and flow, and are apt, on the principles of that rude philosophy of sympathy and resemblance... to trace a subtle relation, a secret harmony, between its tides and the life of man... The belief that most deaths happen at ebb tide is said to be held along the east coast of England from Northumberland to Kent.

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

James Frazer
By religion, then, I understand a propitiation or conciliation of powers superior to man which are believed to direct and control the course of nature and of human life.

James Frazer
It may be suspected that the custom of employing a divine man or animal as a public scapegoat is much more widely diffused than appears from the examples cited.

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
In the ages to come man may be able to predict, perhaps even to control, the wayward courses of the winds and the clouds, but hardly will his puny hands have strength to speed afresh our slackening planet in its orbit or rekindle the dying fire of the sun. Yet the philosopher who trembles at the idea of such distant catastrophes may console himself by reflecting that these gloomy apprehensions, like the earth and the sun themselves, are only parts of that unsubstantial world which thought has conjured up out of the void, and that the phantoms which the subtle enchantress has evoked today she may ban tomorrow. They too, like so much that to the common eye seems solid, may melt into air, into thin air.

James Frazer
In primitive society, where uniformity of occupation is the rule, and the distribution of the community into various classes of workers has hardly begun, every man is more or less his own magician; he practices charms and incantations for his own good and the injury of his enemies.

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

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
The mind of man refuses to acquiesce in the phenomena of sense. By an instinctive, an irresistible impulse it is driven to seek something beyond, something which it assumes to be more real and abiding than the shifting phantasmagoria of this sensible world.

James Frazer