Thirst of power and of riches now bear sway, the passion and infirmity of age.
—James Anthony Froude
Topics: Age
Mistakes are often the best teachers.
—James Anthony Froude
Topics: Difficulties, Adversity
Courage is, on all hands, considered as an essential of high character.
—James Anthony Froude
Topics: Courage
Our human laws are more or less imperfect copies of the external laws as we see them.
—James Anthony Froude
Topics: Law, Lawyers
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
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
Superior strength is found in the long run to lie with those who had right on their side.
—James Anthony Froude
Topics: Strength
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
We enter the world alone, we leave the world alone.
—James Anthony Froude
Topics: Loneliness
Where all are selfish, the sage is no better than the fool, and only rather more dangerous.
—James Anthony Froude
Topics: Selfishness
The practical effect of a belief is the real test of its soundness.
—James Anthony Froude
Topics: Belief
Science rests on reason and experiment, and can meet an opponent with calmness; but a belief is always sensitive.
—James Anthony Froude
Topics: Science, Scientists
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
Justice without wisdom is impossible.
—James Anthony Froude
Topics: Justice
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
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
The first duty of an historian is to be on guard against his own sympathies.
—James Anthony Froude
Topics: Historians, History
Men are by nature unequal.—It is rain, therefore, to treat them as if they were equal.
—James Anthony Froude
Topics: Equality
No person is ever good for much, that hasn’t been swept off their feet by enthusiasm between ages twenty and thirty.
—James Anthony Froude
Topics: Enthusiasm
To deny the freedom of the will is to make morality impossible.
—James Anthony Froude
Topics: Will, Will Power, Willpower
Half the vices in the world rise out of cowardice, and one who is afraid of lying is usually afraid of nothing else.
—James Anthony Froude
Topics: Lying
Calvinism has produced characters nobler and grander than any which republican Rome ever produced.
—James Anthony Froude
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
The essence of greatness is neglect of the self.
—James Anthony Froude
Topics: Greatness & Great Things, Greatness
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
The superstition of science scoffs at the superstition of faith.
—James Anthony Froude
Topics: Superstition
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, Opinions, History
There is nothing certain except the unforeseen.
—James Anthony Froude
Topics: Foresight, Certainty
Experience teaches slowly and at the cost of mistakes.
—James Anthony Froude
Topics: Mistakes, Experience
There was not a reformer in Europe so resolute as Calvin to exorcise, tear out, and destroy what was seen to be false—so resolute to establish what was true in its place, and to make truth, to the last fibre of it, the rule of practical life.
—James Anthony Froude
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 Writer
- 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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