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
Wondering Whom to Read Next?
- C. Northcote Parkinson British Historian
- Arnold J. Toynbee British Historian
- Edward Gibbon English Historian
- Winston Churchill British Head of State
- Gladys Bronwyn Stern British Novelist
- Plutarch Greek Biographer
- David McCullough American Historian
- V. S. Pritchett British Short Story Writer
- Samuel Johnson British Essayist
- Lytton Strachey British Biographer
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