James Anthony Froude Quotes
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Life is change, to cease to change is to cease to live; yet if you may shed a tear beside the death-bed of an old friend, let not your heart be silent on the dissolving of a faith.
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Fling away your soul once for all, your own small self; if you will find it again. Count not even on immortality.
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Instruction does not prevent wasted time or mistakes; and mistakes themselves are often the best teachers of all.
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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.
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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.
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I scarcely know a professional man I can like, and certainly not one who has been what the world calls successful, that I should the least wish to resemble.
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As we advance in life, we learn the limits of our abilities.
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No person is ever good for much, that hasn't been swept off their feet by enthusiasm between ages twenty and thirty.
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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.
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Philosophy goes no further than probabilities, and in every assertion keeps a doubt in reserve.
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I would sooner perish for ever than stoop down before a Being who may have power to crush me, but whom my heart forbids me to reverence.
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The soul of man is not a thing which comes and goes, is builded and decays like the elemental frame in which it is set to dwell, but a very living force, a very energy of God's organic will, which rules and moulds this universe.
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Ignorance is the dominion of absurdity.
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The secret of a person's nature lies in their religion and what they really believes about the world and their place in it.
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Minds vary in sensitiveness and in self-power, as bodies do in susceptibility of attraction and repulsion. When, when shall we learn that they are governed by laws as inexorable as physical laws, and that a man can as easily refuse to obey what has power over him as a steel atom can resist the magnet?
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We enter the world alone, we leave the world alone.
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When a woman's heart is flowing over for the first time with deep and passionate love, she is all love. Every faculty of her soul rushes together in the intensity of the one feeling; thought, reflection, conscience, duty, the past, the future, they are names to her light as the breath which speaks them; her soul is full.
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I could never fear a God who kept a hell prison-house. No, not though he flung me there because I refused. There is a power stronger than such a one; and it is possible to walk unscathed even in the burning furnace.
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The Providence that watches over the affairs of men works out of their mistakes, at times, a healthier issue than could have been accomplished by their wisest forethought.
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The better one is morally the less aware they are of their virtue.
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There are at bottom but two possible religions--that which rises in the moral nature of man, and which takes shape in moral commandments, and that which grows out of the observation of the material energies which operate in the external universe.
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What is right or duty without power? To tell a man it is his duty to submit his judgment to the judgment of the church, is like telling a wife it is her duty to love her husband - a thing easy to say, but meaning simply nothing. Affection must be won, not commanded.
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It may be from some moral obliquity in myself, or from some strange disease; but for me, and I should think too for every human being in whose breast a human heart is beating, to know that one single creature is in that dreadful place would make a hell of heaven itself. And they have hearts in heaven, for they love there.
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To be enthusiastic about doing much with human nature is a foolish business indeed; and, throwing himself into his work as he was doing, and expecting so much from it, would not the tide ebb as strongly as it was flowing? It is a rash game this setting our hearts on any future beyond what we have our own selves control over. Things do not walk as we settle with ourselves they ought to walk, and to hope is almost the correlative of to be disappointed.