James Anthony Froude Quotes
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Experience teaches slowly, and at the cost of mistakes.
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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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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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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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As we advance in life, we learn the limits of our abilities.
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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 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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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 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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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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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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We enter the world alone, we leave the world alone.
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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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Philosophy goes no further than probabilities, and in every assertion keeps a doubt in reserve.
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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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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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The better one is morally the less aware they are of their virtue.
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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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There are epidemics of nobleness as well as epidemics of disease.
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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.
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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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I cut a hole in my heart and wrote with the blood.