James Frazer Short Quotes

25 Sourced Quotes

View all James Frazer Quotes
Ancient magic was the very foundation of religion.

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

James Frazer
For the present we have journeyed far enough together, and it is time to part.

James Frazer
In point of fact magicians appear to have often developed into chiefs and kings.

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

James Frazer
From time immemorial the mistletoe has been the object of superstitious veneration in Europe.

James Frazer
The scapegoat upon whom the sins of the people are periodically laid, may also be a human being.

James Frazer
Yet perhaps no sacrifice is wholly useless which proves there are men who prefer honour to life.

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

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

James Frazer
If mankind had always been logical and wise, history would not be a long chronicle of folly and crime.

James Frazer
For there are strong grounds for thinking that, in the evolution of thought, magic has preceded religion.

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
The custom of burning a beneficent god is too foreign to later modes of thought to escape misinterpretation.

James Frazer
The moral world is as little exempt as the physical world from the law of ceaseless change, of perpetual flux.

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

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

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

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
To a modern reader the connexion at first site may not be obvious between the activity of the hangman and the productivity of the earth.

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
If their king is their god, he is or should be also their preserver; and if he will not preserve them, he must make room for another who will.

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
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
The abundance, the solidity, and the splendor of the results already achieved by science are well fitted to inspire us with a cheerful confidence in the soundness of its method.

James Frazer
A candidate for the priesthood could only succeed to office by slaying the priest, and having slain him, he retained office till he was himself slain by a stronger or a craftier.

James Frazer
When a tree comes to be viewed, no longer as the body of the tree spirit, but simply as its abode which it can quit at pleasure, an important advance has been made in religious thought.

James Frazer