Inspirational Quotations

Inspirational Quotes by James Anthony Froude (British Historian)

James Anthony Froude (1818–94) was a prolific Victorian novelist, historian, and biographer. His literary accomplishment is remarkable for not only its variety and its originality, but also for the controversy it generated.

Froude’s autobiographical melodramatic novel The Nemesis of Faith (1849) described the reasons for and the outcomes of a young priest’s crisis of faith. The book created a furor and was publicly burned. Froude was disgraced and resigned from his Oxford fellowship. (Forty-three years later, he returned to Oxford as a distinguished professor of modern history, and held this position until death.)

After resigning from Oxford, Froude took up historical writing and published History of England (12 vols., 1856–70.) This book was well-liked for its research and spirited narrative but attracted controversy for its Protestant interpretation of historical events. Froude also wrote biographies of Benjamin Disraeli, Desiderius Erasmus, Martin Luther, Julius Caesar, John Bunyan, Thomas Becket, Robert Burns, Francis Bacon, Henry VIII, and numerous other historical figures.

Froude is best known as the literary executor and biographer of his mentor, the historian Thomas Carlyle, as well as Carlyle’s wife, Jane Welsh. Froude’s biography of Thomas Carlyle is considered one of the most excellent examples of English literary biography. Froude’s publication of Welsh’s letters attracted debate for alluding to the less-pleasant aspects of her marriage to Carlyle. Froude also contended that Jane had given up her literary talents and ambitions in favor of her husband’s career. Though Froude claimed that a sincere biographer must fully explore a subject’s defects of character, his critics interpreted his frankness as a betrayal of Carlyle’s memory.

More: Wikipedia READ: Works by James Anthony Froude

A person possessed with an idea cannot be reasoned with.
James Anthony Froude
Topics: Reason

To deny the freedom of the will is to make morality impossible.
James Anthony Froude
Topics: Will, Will Power, Willpower

That which especially distinguishes a high order of man from a lower, and which constitutes human goodness and nobleness, is self-forgetfulness, self-sacrifice, the disregard of personal pleasure, personal indulgence, personal advantage, remote or present, because some other line of conduct is more right.
James Anthony Froude

Morality, when vigorously alive, sees farther than intellect, and provides unconsciously for intellectual difficulties.
James Anthony Froude
Topics: Morality

History is a voice forever sounding across the centuries the laws of right and wrong. Opinions alter, manners change, creeds rise and fall, but the moral law is written on the tablets of eternity. For every false word or unrighteous deed, for cruelty and oppression, for lust or vanity, the price has to be paid at last.
James Anthony Froude
Topics: Opinion, History, Opinions

There is nothing certain except the unforeseen.
James Anthony Froude
Topics: Certainty, Foresight

In common things the law of sacrifice takes the form of positive duty.
James Anthony Froude
Topics: Sacrifice, Duty

The Bible, thoroughly known, is literature in itself—the rarest and richest in all departments of thought and imagination which exists.
James Anthony Froude
Topics: Bible

You cannot dream yourself into a character; you must hammer and forge yourself one.
James Anthony Froude
Topics: Attitude, Procrastination, Dreams, Getting Going, Character, Inaction, Self-Discovery

Men are by nature unequal.—It is rain, therefore, to treat them as if they were equal.
James Anthony Froude
Topics: Equality

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
Topics: Virtue

When we would, with utmost detestation, single some monster from the traitor herd, ’tis but to say ingratitude is his crime.
James Anthony Froude
Topics: Ingratitude

To be entirely just in our estimate of other ages is not only difficult, but is impossible. Even what is passing in our presence we see but through a glass darkly. In historical inquiries the most instructed thinkers have but a limited advantage over the most illiterate. Those who know the most approach least to agreement.
James Anthony Froude
Topics: History

Human improvement is from within outward.
James Anthony Froude
Topics: Character

The secret of a person’s nature lies in their religion and what they really believes about the world and their place in it.
James Anthony Froude
Topics: Humanity, Humankind

We take rank by descent. Such of us as have the longest pedigree, and are therefore the furthest removed from the first who made the fortune and founded the family, we are the noblest.
James Anthony Froude
Topics: Ancestry

If we think of religion only as a means of escaping what we call the wrath to come, we shall not escape it; we are under the burden of death, if we care only for ourselves.
James Anthony Froude
Topics: Religion

Calvinism has produced characters nobler and grander than any which republican Rome ever produced.
James Anthony Froude

The Providence that watches over the affairs of men, works out their mistakes, at times, to a healthier issue than could have been accomplished by their wisest forethought.
James Anthony Froude
Topics: Mistake

Our human laws are more or less imperfect copies of the external laws as we see them.
James Anthony Froude
Topics: Lawyers, Law

Justice without wisdom is impossible.
James Anthony Froude
Topics: Justice

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
Topics: Humankind, Sports, Humanity

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
Topics: Faith

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

Science rests on reason and experiment, and can meet an opponent with calmness; but a belief is always sensitive.
James Anthony Froude
Topics: Scientists, Science

As we advance in life we learn the limits of our abilities.
James Anthony Froude
Topics: One liners, Ability

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

The first duty of an historian is to be on guard against his own sympathies.
James Anthony Froude
Topics: Historians, History

Our human laws are but the copies, more or less imperfect, of the eternal laws, so far as we can read them.
James Anthony Froude
Topics: Law

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
Topics: Selfishness

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