James Anthony Froude famous quotes

Human improvement is from within outward.
-- James Anthony Froude

#Improvement #Humans

The essence of greatness is neglect of the self.
-- James Anthony Froude

#Acceptance #Greatness #Self

You cannot dream yourself into a character; you must hammer and forge yourself one.
-- James Anthony Froude

#Inspirational #Life #Motivational

As we advance in life, we learn the limits of our abilities.
-- James Anthony Froude

#Life #Learning #Acceptance

Instruction does not prevent wasted time or mistakes; and mistakes themselves are often the best teachers of all.
-- James Anthony Froude

#Inspirational #Teacher #Mistake

The practical effect of a belief is the real test of its soundness.
-- James Anthony Froude

#Real #Tests #Belief

Wild animals never kill for sport. Man is the only one to whom the torture and death of his fellow creatures is amusing in itself.
-- James Anthony Froude

#Sports #Honesty #Integrity

Fear is the parent of cruelty.
-- James Anthony Froude

#Fear #Parent #Cruelty

I think Nature, if she interests herself much about her children, must often feel that, like the miserable Frankenstein, with her experimenting among the elements of humanity, she has brought beings into existence who have no business here; who can do none of her work, and endure none of her favours; whose life is only suffering; and whose action is one long protest against the ill foresight which flung them into consciousness.
-- James Anthony Froude

#Children #Thinking #Long

You cannot reason people into loving those whom they are not drawn to love; they cannot reason themselves into it; and there are some contrarieties of temper which are too strong even for the obligations of relationship.
-- James Anthony Froude

#Strong #People #Reason

Scepticism, like wisdom, springs out in full panoply only from the brain of a god, and it is little profit to see an idea in its growth, unless we track its seed to the power which sowed it.
-- James Anthony Froude

#Spring #Ideas #Track

We call heaven our home, as the best name we know to give it.
-- James Anthony Froude

#Home #Names #Giving

Woe to the unlucky man who as a child is taught, even as a portion of his creed, what his grown reason must forswear.
-- James Anthony Froude

#Children #Men #Woe

The trials of life will not wait for us. They come at their own time, not caring much to inquire how ready we may be to meet them.
-- James Anthony Froude

#Caring #Waiting #Trials

A dreamer he was, and ever would be. Yet dreaming need not injure us, if it do but take its turn with waking; and even dreams themselves may be turned to beauty, by favoured men to whom nature has given the powers of casting them into form.
-- James Anthony Froude

#Dream #Men #Would Be

Women's eyes are rapid in detecting a heart which is ill at ease with itself, and, knowing the value of sympathy, and finding their own greatest happiness not in receiving it, but in giving it, with them to be unhappy is at once to be interesting.
-- James Anthony Froude

#Heart #Eye #Knowing

Our thoughts and our conduct are our own.
-- James Anthony Froude

#Character

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

#Selfish #Sage #Fool

Life is more than a theory, and love of truth butters no bread: old men who have had to struggle along their way, who know the endless bitterness, the grave moral deterioration which follow an empty exchequer, may well be pardoned for an over-wish to see their sons secured from it; hunger, at least, is a reality...
-- James Anthony Froude

#Struggle #Son #Reality

Do you not think that sometimes when matters are at the worst with us, when we appear to have done all which we ourselves can do, yet all has been unavailing, and we have only shown we cannot, not we will not, help ourselves; that often just then something comes, almost as if supernaturally, to settle for us, as if our guardian angel took pity on our perplexities, and then at last obtained leave to help us? And if it be so, then what might only be a coincidence becomes a call of Providence, a voice from Heaven, a command.
-- James Anthony Froude

#Angel #Thinking #Voice

Life is change, to cease to change is to cease to live; yet if you may shed a tear beside the death-bed of an old friend, let not your heart be silent on the dissolving of a faith.
-- James Anthony Froude

#Heart #Old Friends #Tears

Charity is from person to person; and it loses half, far more than half, its moral value when the giver is not brought into personal relation with those to whom he gives.
-- James Anthony Froude

#Giving #Half #Charity

The endurance of the inequalities of life by the poor is the marvel of human society.
-- James Anthony Froude

#Endurance #Poor #Inequality

Experience teaches slowly, and at the cost of mistakes.
-- James Anthony Froude

#Mistake #Failure #Cost

Now, to a single-minded man, who is either brave enough or reckless enough to surrender himself wholly to one idea, and look neither right nor left, but only forward, what earthly consequences may follow is not material. Persecution strengthens him; and so he is sure he is right, whether his course end in a prison or on a throne is no matter at all. But men of this calibre are uncommon in any age or in any country very uncommon in this age and this country.
-- James Anthony Froude

#Country #Men #Ideas

Fling away your soul once for all, your own small self; if you will find it again. Count not even on immortality.
-- James Anthony Froude

#Self #Soul #Immortality

Look not to have your sepulchre built in after ages hy the same foolish hands which still ever destroy the living prophet. Small honour for you if they do build it; and may be they never will build it.
-- James Anthony Froude

#Hands #Age #Looks

For me this world was neither so high nor so low as the Church would have it; chequered over with its wild light shadows, I could love it and all the children of it, more dearly, perhaps, because it was not all light.
-- James Anthony Froude

#Children #Light #Shadow

Experience is no more transferable in morals than in art.
-- James Anthony Froude

#Art #Experience #Moral

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

#Fall #Past #Light

I cut a hole in my heart and wrote with the blood .
-- James Anthony Froude

#Heart #Cutting #Blood

I scarcely know a professional man I can like, and certainly not one who has been what the world calls successful, that I should the least wish to resemble.
-- James Anthony Froude

#Successful #Men #Wish

I would sooner perish for ever than stoop down before a Being who may have power to crush me, but whom my heart forbids me to reverence.
-- James Anthony Froude

#Crush #Heart #May

The war of good and evil is mightiest in mightiest souls, and even in the darkest time the heart will maintain its right against the hardest creed.
-- James Anthony Froude

#War #Heart #Evil

It may be from some moral obliquity in myself, or from some strange disease; but for me, and I should think too for every human being in whose breast a human heart is beating, to know that one single creature is in that dreadful place would make a hell of heaven itself. And they have hearts in heaven, for they love there.
-- James Anthony Froude

#Heart #Thinking #Heaven

In every department of life--in its business and in its pleasures, in its beliefs and in its theories, in its material developments and in its spiritual connections--we thank God that we are not like our fathers.
-- James Anthony Froude

#Spiritual #Father #Progress

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

#Sacrifice #Religion #Elements

There are at bottom but two possible religions--that which rises in the moral nature of man, and which takes shape in moral commandments, and that which grows out of the observation of the material energies which operate in the external universe.
-- James Anthony Froude

#Men #Two #Religion

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

#Courage #Character #Hands

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

#Happiness #Complaining #World

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

#Men #Law #Good Man

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

#Nature #Self #Needs

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

#Sacrifice #Men #Self

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

#Flower #Self #Essence

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

#Solitude

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

#Men #Soul #Energy

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

#Appreciate #Genius #Lines

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

#Education

I believe in God, not because the Bible tells me that he is, but because my heart tells me so; and the same heart tells me we can only have His peace with us if we love Him and obey Him, and that we can only he happy when we each love our neighbour better than ourselves.
-- James Anthony Froude

#Believe #Heart #Neighbour

What is right or duty without power ? To tell a man it is his duty to submit his judgment to the judgment of the church, is like telling a wife it is her duty to love her husband a thing easy to say, but meaning simply nothing. Affection must be won, not commanded.
-- James Anthony Froude

#Husband #Men #Wife

It is ill changing the creed to meet each rising temptation. The soul is truer than it seems, and refuses to be trifled with.
-- James Anthony Froude

#Temptation #Soul #Rising

When a woman's heart is flowing over for the first time with deep and passionate love, she is all love. Every faculty of her soul rushes together in the intensity of the one feeling; thought, reflection, conscience, duty, the past, the future, they are names to her light as the breath which speaks them; her soul is full.
-- James Anthony Froude

#Heart #Reflection #Past

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

#Needs #Next #Opinion

I have long been convinced that the Christian Eucharist is but a continuation of the Eleusinian mysteries. St Paul, in using the word teleiois, almost confirms this.
-- James Anthony Froude

#Christian #Long #Atheism

Thirst of power and of riches now bear sway, The passion and infirmity of age.
-- James Anthony Froude

#Passion #Age #Riches

Thy plain and open nature sees mankind But in appearance, not what they are.
-- James Anthony Froude

#Appearance #Mankind

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

#Men #Two #Attention

Carelessness is inexcusable, and merits the inevitable sequence.
-- James Anthony Froude

#Merit #Inevitable #Carelessness

To tell men that they cannot help themselves is to fling them into recklessness and despair.
-- James Anthony Froude

#Men #Despair #Helping

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

#Sweet #Truth #Smell