James Anthony Froude Quotes
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The first duty of an historian is to be on guard against his own sympathies.
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It is ill changing the creed to meet each rising temptation. The soul is truer than it seems, and refuses to be trifled with.
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Carelessness is inexcusable, and merits the inevitable sequence.
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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.
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Perhaps the heart does not deceive; never does give a false answer, except to those double-minded unhappy ones who do care about themselves, and so play tricks with it and tamper with it.
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Truth only smells sweet forever, and illusions, however innocent, are deadly as the canker worm.
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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.
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Once, once for all, if you would save your heart from breaking, learn this lesson - once for all you must cease, in this world, to believe in the eternity of any creed or form at all. Whatever grows in time is a child of time, and is born and lives, and dies at its appointed day like ourselves.
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Beautiful is old age—beautiful as the slow-dropping mellow autumn of a rich glorious summer. In the old man, Nature has fulfilled her work; she loads him with blessings; she fills him with the fruits of a well-spent life; and, surrounded by his children and his children's children, she rocks him softly away to a grave, to which he is followed with blessings. God forbid we should not call it beautiful.
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The men that write books, Carlyle says, are now the world's priests, the spiritual directors of mankind.
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To deny the freedom of the will is to make morality impossible.
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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.
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The moral system of the universe is like a document written in alternate ciphers, which change from line to line.
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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.
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Man is a real man, and can live and act manfully in this world, not in the strength of opinions, not according to what he thinks, but according to what he is.
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The endurance of the inequalities of life by the poor is the marvel of human society.
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The essence of greatness is neglect of the self.
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We call heaven our home, as the best name we know to give it.
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That in these times every serious person should not in his heart have felt some difliculty with the doctrines of the incarnation, I cannot helieve. We are not as we were. When Christianity was first published, the imagination of mankind presented the relation of heaven to earth very differently from what it does now.
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Human improvement is from within outward.
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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.
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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.
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She would gladly have been more to him than she could be - because she felt (she did not deny it to herself) that she would sooner have been his wife than Leonard's. But why, because they could not be all to one another, must they be as nothing?
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Experience teaches slowly, and at the cost of mistakes.