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
But not long; for in the tedious minutes’ exquisite interval—I’m on the rack; for sure the greatest evil man can know bears no proportion to this dread suspense.
—James Anthony Froude
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
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: Sports, Humankind, Humanity
As we advance in life we learn the limits of our abilities.
—James Anthony Froude
Topics: Ability, One liners
The first duty of an historian is to be on guard against his own sympathies.
—James Anthony Froude
Topics: Historians, History
To deny the freedom of the will is to make morality impossible.
—James Anthony Froude
Topics: Will, Will Power, Willpower
Morality, when vigorously alive, sees farther than intellect, and provides unconsciously for intellectual difficulties.
—James Anthony Froude
Topics: Morality
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
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
Human improvement is from within outward.
—James Anthony Froude
Topics: Character
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
There is nothing certain except the unforeseen.
—James Anthony Froude
Topics: Certainty, Foresight
Superior strength is found in the long run to lie with those who had right on their side.
—James Anthony Froude
Topics: Strength
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
Where all are selfish, the sage is no better than the fool, and only rather more dangerous.
—James Anthony Froude
Topics: Selfishness
Literature happens to be the only occupation in which wages are not given in proportion to the goodness of the work done.
—James Anthony Froude
Topics: Literature
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
We enter the world alone, we leave the world alone.
—James Anthony Froude
Topics: Loneliness
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
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
Justice without wisdom is impossible.
—James Anthony Froude
Topics: Justice
Thirst of power and of riches now bear sway, the passion and infirmity of age.
—James Anthony Froude
Topics: Age
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
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
Ignorance is the dominion of absurdity.
—James Anthony Froude
Topics: Ignorance
Our human laws are more or less imperfect copies of the external laws as we see them.
—James Anthony Froude
Topics: Law, Lawyers
Philosophy goes no further than probabilities, and in every assertion keeps a doubt in reserve.
—James Anthony Froude
Topics: Philosophy, Philosophers
Experience teaches slowly and at the cost of mistakes.
—James Anthony Froude
Topics: Mistakes, Experience
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