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James Anthony Froude

99 quotes

“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.”
James Anthony Froude (1818–1894) said by 1894 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Christ came bringing with him the knowledge that God was not a demon, but a being of infinite goodness—that the service required of mankind was not a service of ceremony, but a service of obedience and love—obedience to laws of morality, and love and charity towards man.”
James Anthony Froude (1818–1894) first seen 1866 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: History of England from the Fall of Wolsey to the Death of Elizabeth. Reign of Elizabeth. Volume III (1866), pp. 300-301
“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 (1818–1894) said by 1894 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: pp. 25-26; Lord Acton quoted the first sentence of this statement in an address "The Study Of History" (11 June 1895), and it has often since been misattributed to him. The phrase has also sometimes been misquoted as: O…
“The address of history is less to the understanding than to the higher emotions. We learn in it to sympathise with what is great and good; we learn to hate what is base. In the anomalies of fortune we feel the mystery of our mortal existence, and in the companionship of the illustrious natures who have shaped the fortunes of the world, we escape from the littlenesses which cling to the round of common life, and our minds are tuned in a higher and nobler key.”
James Anthony Froude (1818–1894) said by 1894 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“When two countries, or sections of countries, stand geographically so related to one another that their union under a common government will conduce to the advantage of one of them, such countries will continue separate as long only as there is equality of force between them, or as long as the country which desires to preserve its independence possesses a power of resistance so vigorous that the effort to overcome it is too exhausting to be permanently maintained.”
James Anthony Froude (1818–1894) said by 1894 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“When the ties of kindred and of speech have force enough to bind together a powerful community, such a community may be able to defend its independence. If it fail, the pretension in itself has no claim on the consideration of the rest of mankind.”
James Anthony Froude (1818–1894) said by 1894 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“On the whole, and as a rule, superior strength is the equivalent of superior merit; and when a weaker people are induced or forced to part with their separate existence, and are not treated as subjects, but are admitted freely to share the privileges of the nation in which they are absorbed, they forfeit nothing which they need care to lose, and rather gain than suffer by the exchange.”
James Anthony Froude (1818–1894) said by 1894 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Nature is less partial than she appears, and all situations in life have their compensations along with them.”
James Anthony Froude (1818–1894) first seen 1880 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Bunyan (1880), Ch. X, p. 175; a 2005 edition is also available from Kessinger Publishing
“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 (1818–1894) first seen 1886 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Oceana, or, England and Her Colonies (1886) [C. Scribner's Sons, 1972, , 9780836990966, 396 pages], p. 67
“The first duty of an historian is to be on his guard against his own sympathies; but he cannot wholly escape their influence.”
James Anthony Froude (1818–1894) first seen 1891 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Divorce of Catherine of Aragon (1891)
“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.”
James Anthony Froude (1818–1894) said by 1894 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Reported in Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), p. 278.
“I know that even in this faithless age there are many persons to whom the Bible is what it was to Calvin — its smallest word as really the voice of God, its most trifling part as sacred; and to these persons I know I shall have given very great pain. They may not believe me when I say I am sorry for it; but if they will not, at least they will believe with me, that those who fight against God are most fighting against themselves; that He can and will protect His truth, and that every blow which is aimed against it will not injure truth, but will recoil on the striker's head. So far they will go with me. In the prayer that it may be so, may they and I unite.”
James Anthony Froude (1818–1894) first seen 1849 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Preface, Second edition (21 June 1849)
“I know but one man, of more than miserable intellect, who in these modern times has dared defend eternal punishment on the score of justice, and that is Leibnitz; a man who, if I know him rightly, chose the subject from its difficulty as an opportunity for the display of his genius, and cared so little for the truth that his conclusions did not cost his heart a pang, or wring a single tear from him. And what does Leibnitz say? That sin, forsooth, though itself be only finite, yet, because it is against an Infinite Being, contracts a character of infinity, and so must be infinitely punished. It is odd that the clever Leibnitz should not have seen that a finite punishment, inflicted by the same Infinite Being, would itself of course contract the same character of infinity.”
James Anthony Froude (1818–1894) said by 1894 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I would not so dishonour God as to lend my voice to perpetuate all the mad and foolish things which men have dared to say of Him. I believe that we may find in the Bible the highest and purest religion ..... most of all in the history of Him in whose name we all are called. His religion — not the Christian religion, but the religion of Christ — the poor man's gospel; the message of forgiveness, of reconciliation, of love; and, oh, how gladly would I spend my life, in season and out of season, in preaching this! But I must have no hell terrors, none of these fear doctrines; they were not in the early creeds, God knows whether they were ever in the early gospels, or ever passed His lips. He went down to hell, but it was to break the chains, not to bind them.”
James Anthony Froude (1818–1894) said by 1894 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The Mahometans say their Koran was written by God. The Hindoos say the Vedas were; we say the Bible was, and we are but interested witnesses in deciding absolutely and exclusively for ourselves. If it be immeasurably the highest of the three, it is because it is not the most divine but the most human. It does not differ from them in kind; and it seems to me that in ascribing it to God we are doing a double dishonour; to ourselves for want of faith in our soul's strength, and to God in making Him responsible for our weakness. There is nothing in it but what men might have written; much, oh much, which it would drive me mad to think any but men, and most mistaken men, had written. Yet still, as a whole, it is by far the noblest collection of sacred books in the world; the outpouring of the mind of a people in whom a larger share of God's spirit was for many centuries working than in any other of mankind, or who at least most clearly caught and carried home to themselves the idea of the direct and immediate dependence of the world upon Him. It is so good that as men looked at it they said this is too good for man: nothing but the inspiration of God could have given this. Likely enough men should say so; but what might be admired as a metaphor became petrified into a doctrine, and perhaps the world has never witnessed any more grotesque idol-worship than what has resulted from it in modern Bibliolatry. And yet they say we are not Christians, we cannot be religious teachers, nay, we are without religion, we are infidels, unless we believe with them. We have not yet found the liberty with which Christ has made us free. Infidels, Arthur! Ah, it is a hard word ! The only infidelity I know is to distrust God, to distrust his care of us, his love for us. And yet that word! How words cling to us, and like an accursed spell force us to become what they say we have become.”
James Anthony Froude (1818–1894) said by 1894 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“There is a village in the wood, two or three miles from here — there was an abbey there once. But there is nothing left of the abbey but its crumbling walls, and it serves only for a burying-ground and for sentimental picnic parties. I was there to-day; I sat there a long time, I do not know how long — I was not conscious of the place. I was listening to what it was saying to me. I will write it down and look at it, and you shall look at it: an odd enough subject for a Christian ruin to choose — it began to talk about paganism. "Do you know what paganism means? " it said. Pagani, Pagans, the old country villagers. In all history there is no more touching word than that one of Pagan. In the great cities, where men gather in their crowds and the work of the world is done, and the fate of the world is determined, there it is that the ideas of succeeding eras breed and grow and gather form and power, and grave out the moulds for the stamp of after ages. There it was, in those old Roman times, that the new faith rose in its strength, with its churches, its lecture-rooms, its societies. It threw down the gorgeous temples, it burnt their carved cedar work, it defiled the altars and scattered the ashes to the winds. The statues were sanctified and made the images of saints, the augurs' colleges were rudely violated, and they who were still faithful were offered up as martyrs, or scattered as wanderers over the face of the earth, and the old gods were expelled from their old dominion — the divinity of nature before the divinity of man. … Change is strong, but habit is strong too; and you cannot change the old for new, like a garment. Far out in the country, in the woods, in the villages, for a few more centuries, the deposed gods still found a refuge in the simple minds of simple men, who were contented to walk in the ways of their fathers — to believe where they had believed, to pray where they had prayed. What was it to these, the pomp of the gorgeous worship, the hierarchy of saints, the proud cathedral, and the thoughts which shook mankind? Did not the sky bend over them as of old in its calm beauty, the sun roll on the same old path, and give them light and warmth and happy sunny hearts? The star-gods still watched them as they slept — why should they turn away? why seek for newer guardians? Year by year the earth put on her robes of leaves and sweetest flowers — the rich harvests waved over the corn-fields, and the fruit-trees and the vineyards travailed as of old; winter and summer, spring and autumn, rain and sunshine, day and night, moving on in their never-ending harmony of change. The gods of their fathers had given their fathers these good things; had their power waxed slack? Was not their powerful hand stretched out still? Pan, almighty Pan! He had given, and he gave still.”
James Anthony Froude (1818–1894) said by 1894 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Oh! what a frightful business is this modern society; the race for wealth — wealth. I am ashamed to write the word. Wealth means well-being, weal, the opposite of woe. And is that money? or can money buy it? We boast much of the purity of our faith, of the sins of idolatry among the Romanists, and we send missionaries to the poor unenlightened heathens, to bring them out of their darkness into our light, our glorious light; but oh! if you may measure the fearfulness of an idol by the blood which stains its sacrifice, by the multitude of its victims, where in all the world, in the fetish of the poor negro, in the hideous car of Indian Juggernaut, can you find a monster whose worship is polluted by such enormity as this English one of money!”
James Anthony Froude (1818–1894) said by 1894 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I will be candid. I believe God is a just God, rewarding and punishing us exactly as we act well or ill. I believe that such reward and punishment follow necessarily from His will as revealed in natural law, as well as in the Bible. I believe that as the highest justice is the highest mercy, so He is a merciful God. That the guilty should suffer the measure of penalty which their guilt has incurred, is justice. What we call mercy is not the remission of this, but rather the remission of the extremity of the sentence attached to the act, when we find something in the nature of the causes which led to the act which lightens the moral guilt of the agent. That each should have his exact due is Just — is the best for himself. That the consequence of his guilt should he transferred from him to one who is innocent (although that innocent one he himself willing to accept it), whatever else it be, is not justice. We are mocking the word when we call it such. If I am to use the word justice in any sense at all which human feeling attaches to it, then to permit such transfer is but infinitely deepening the wrong, and seconding the first fault by greater injustice. I am speaking only of the doctrine of the atonement in its human aspect, and as we are to learn anything from it of the divine nature or of human duty.”
James Anthony Froude (1818–1894) said by 1894 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“To suppose that by our disobedience we have taken something away from God, in the loss of which He suffers, for which He requires satisfaction, and that this satisfaction has been made to Him by the cross sacrifice (as if doing wrong were incurring a debt to Him, which somehow must be paid, though it matters not by whom), is so infinitely derogatory to His majesty, to every idea which I can form of His nature, that to believe it in any such sense as this confounds and overwhelms me. In the strength of my own soul, for myself, at least, I would say boldly, rather let me bear the consequences of my own acts myself, even if it be eternal vengeance, and God requires it, than allow the shadow of my sin to fall upon the innocent.”
James Anthony Froude (1818–1894) said by 1894 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I know that in early ages men did form degraded notions of the Almighty, painting Him like themselves, extreme only in all their passions : they thought He could he as lightly irritated as themselves, and that they could appease His anger by wretched offerings of innocent animals. From such a feeling as this to the sense of the value of a holy and spotless life and death — from the sacrifice of an animal to that of a saint — is a step forward out of superstition quite immeasurable. That between the earnest conviction of partial sight, and the strong metaphors of vehement minds, the sacrificial language should have been transferred onwards from one to the other, seems natural to me; perhaps inevitable. On the other hand, through all history we find the bitter fact that mankind can only be persuaded to accept the best gifts which Heaven sends them, in persecuting and destroying those who are charged to be their bearers.”
James Anthony Froude (1818–1894) said by 1894 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I do not disbelieve that in some mysterious transcendental sense, as involved in the system of the entire universe, with so vast an arc that no faculty of man can apprehend its curve, that in some such sense the Catholic doctrine of the atonement may be true. But a doctrine out of which, with our reason, our feeling, our logic, I at least can gather any practical instruction for mankind — any deeper appreciation of the attributes of God, any deeper love for Him, any stimulant towards our own obedience — such a doctrine I cannot find it. I bury what I am to think of it in the deepest corner of my own heart, where myself I fear to look.”
James Anthony Froude (1818–1894) said by 1894 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Why is it thought so very wicked to be an unbeliever? Rather, why is it assumed that no one can have difficulties unless he be wicked? Because an anathema upon unbelief has been appended as a guardian of the creed. It is one way, and doubtless a very politic way, of maintaining the creed, this of anathema. When everything may be lost unless one holds a particular belief, and nothing except vulgar love of truth can induce one into questioning it, common prudence points out the safe course; but really it is but a vulgar evidence, this of anathema. Genuine belief ended with persecution. As soon as it was felt that to punish a man for maintaining an independent opinion was shocking and unjust, so soon a doubt had entered whether the faith established was unquestionably true.”
James Anthony Froude (1818–1894) said by 1894 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“A man is born into the world — a real man — such a one as it has never seen; he lives a life consistently the very highest; his wisdom is the calm earnest voice of humanity; to the worldly and the commonplace so exasperating, as forcing upon them their own worthlessness — to the good so admirable that every other faculty is absorbed in wonder. The one killed him. The other said, this is too good to be a man — this is God. His calm and simple life was not startling enough for their eager imagination; acts of mercy and kindness were not enough, unless they were beyond the power of man. To cure by ordinary means the bruised body, to lift again with deep sympathy of heart the sinking sinner was not enough. He must speak with power to matter as well as mind; eject diseases and eject devils with command. The means of ordinary birth, to the oriental conception of uncleanness, were too impure for such as he, and one so holy could never dissolve in the vulgar corruption of the grave. Yet to save his example, to give reality to his sufferings, he was a man nevertheless. In him, as philosophy came in to incorporate the first imagination, was the fulness of humanity as well as the fulness of the Godhead. And out of this strange mixture they composed a being whose life is without instruction, whose example is still nothing, whose trial is but a helpless perplexity. The noble image of the man is effaced, is destroyed. Instead of a man to love and to follow, we have a man-god to worship. From being the example of devotion, he is its object; the religion of Christ ended with his life, and left us instead but the Christian religion.”
James Anthony Froude (1818–1894) said by 1894 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The conviction of the martyr that the stake is the gate of Paradise, diminishes the dignity of the suffering in proportion to its strength. If it be absolute certainty, the trial is absolutely nothing. And that all-wise Being who knew all, who himself willed, erected, determined all, what could the worst earthly suffering he to him to whom all the gates which close our knowledge were shining crystal? What trial, what difficulty was it all to him? His temptation is a mockery. His patience, meekness, humility, it is but trifling with words, unless he was a man, and but a man. And yet what does it not say on the other side for mankind, that the life of one good man, which had nothing, nothing but its goodness to recommend it, should have struck so deep into the heart of the race that for eighteen hundred years they have seen in that life something so far above them that they will not claim a kindred origin with him who lived it. And while they have scarcely bettered in their own practice, yet stand, and ever since have stood, self-condemned, in acknowledging in spite of themselves that such goodness alone is divine.”
James Anthony Froude (1818–1894) said by 1894 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“People canvass up and down the value and utility of Christianity, and none of them seem to see that it was the common channel towards which all the great streams of thought in the old world were tending, and that in some form or other when they came to unite it must have been. That it crystallized round a particular person may have been an accident; but in its essence, as soon as the widening intercourse of the nations forced the Jewish mind into contact with the Indian and the Persian and the Grecian, such a religion was absolutely inevitable. It was the development of Judaism in being the fulfilment of the sacrificial theory, and the last and purest conception of a personal God lying close above the world, watching, guiding, directing, interfering. Its object was no longer the narrow one of the temporal interests of a small people. The chrysalis had burst its shell, and the presiding care extended to all mankind, caring not now for bodies only but for souls. It was the development of Parsism in settling finally the vast question of the double principle, the position of the evil spirit, his history, and the method of his defeat; while Zoroaster's doctrine of a future state was now for the first time explained and justified; and his invisible world of angels and spirits, and the hierarchies of the seven heavens, were brought in subjection to the same one God of the Jews.”
James Anthony Froude (1818–1894) said by 1894 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It is alike self-contradictory and contrary to experience, that a man of two goods should choose the lesser, knowing it at the time to be the lesser. Observe, I say, at the time of action. We are complex, and therefore, in our natural state, inconsistent, beings, and the opinion of this hour need not be the opinion of the next. It may be different before the temptation appear; it may return to be different after the temptation is passed; the nearness or distance of objects may alter their relative magnitude, or appetite or passion may obscure the reflecting power, and give a temporary impulsive force to a particular side of our nature. But, uniformly, given a particular condition of a man's nature, and given a number of possible courses, his action is as necessarily determined into the course best corresponding to that condition, as a bar of steel suspended between two magnets is determined towards the most powerful. It may go reluctantly, for it will still feel the attraction of the weaker magnet, but it will still obey the strongest, and must obey. What we call knowing a man's character, is knowing how he will act in such and such conditions. The better we know him the more surely we can prophesy. If we know him perfectly, we are certain.”
James Anthony Froude (1818–1894) said by 1894 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“While we find such endless differences between the actions of different men under the same temptations, or of the same man at different times, we shall yet be unable to find any link of the chain undetermined by the action of the outward circumstance on the inner law; or any point where we can say a power lay in the individual will of choosing either of two courses — in other words, to discover sin. Actions are governed by motives. The power of motives depends on character, and character on the original faculties and the training which they have received from the men or things among which they have been bred. Sin, therefore, as commonly understood, is a chimera.”
James Anthony Froude (1818–1894) said by 1894 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Our instinct has outrun our theory in this matter; for while we still insist upon free will and sin, we make allowance for individuals who have gone wrong, on the very ground of provocation, of temptation, of bad education, of infirm character. By and by philosophy will follow, and so at last we may hope for a true theory of morals. It is curious to watch, in the history of religious beliefs, the gradual elimination of this monster of moral evil. The first state of mankind is the unreflecting state. The nature is undeveloped, looking neither before nor after; it acts on the impulse of the moment, and is troubled with no weary retrospect, nor with any notions of a remote future which present conduct can affect; and knowing neither good nor evil, better or worse, it does simply what it desires, and is happy in it. It is the state analogous to the early childhood of each of us, and is represented in the common theory of Paradise — the state of innocence.”
James Anthony Froude (1818–1894) said by 1894 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It is an old remark, that as men are, such they paint their gods; and as in themselves the passionate, or demonic nature, long preponderated, so the gods they worshipped were demons like themselves, jealous, capricious, exacting, revengeful, the figures which fill the old mythologies, and appear partly in the Old Testament. They feared them as they feared the powerful of their own race, and sought to propitiate them by similar offerings and services. Go on, and now we find ourselves on a third stage; but now fast rising into a clearing atmosphere. The absolute worth of goodness is seen as distinct from power; such beings as these demon gods could not he the highest beings. Good and evil could not coexist in one Supreme; absolutely different in nature, they could not have a common origin; the moral world is bipolar, and we have dualism, the two principles, coeternal, coequal. By and by, again, the horizon widens. The ultimate identity of might and right glimmers out feebly in the Zenda Vesta as the stars come out above the mountains when we climb out of the mist of the valleys. The evil spirit is no longer the absolute independent Ahriman; but Ahriman and Ormuzd are but each a dependent spirit; and an awful formless, boundless figure, the eternal, the illimitable, looms out from the abyss behind them, presently to degrade still farther the falling Ahriman into a mere permitted Satan, finally to be destroyed.”
James Anthony Froude (1818–1894) said by 1894 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Finally rises philosophy, which, after a few monstrous efforts from Calvin to Leibnitz to reconcile contradictions and form a theodice, comes out boldly in Spinozism to declare the impossibility of the existence of a power antagonistic to God; and defining the perfection of man's nature, as the condition under which it has fullest action and freest enjoyment of all its powers, sets this as a moral ideal hefore us, toward which we shall train our moral efforts as the artist trains his artistic efforts towards his ideal. The success is various, as the faculties and conditions which God has given are various; but the spectre which haunted the conscience is gone. Our failures are errors, not crimes — nature's discipline with which God teaches us; and as little violations of His law, or rendering us guilty in His eyes, as the artist's early blunders, or even ultimate and entire failures, are laying store of guilt on him.”
James Anthony Froude (1818–1894) said by 1894 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“We start with enthusiasm — out we go each of us to our task in all the brightness of sunrise, and hope beats along our pulses; we believe the world has no blanks except to cowards, and we find, at last, that, as far as we ourselves are concerned, it has no prizes; we sicken over the endless unprofitableness of labour most when we have most succeeded, and when the time comes for us to lay down our tools we cast them from us with the bitter aching sense, that it were better for us if it had been all a dream. We seem to know either too much or too little of ourselves — too much, for we feel that we are better than we can accomplish; too little, for, if we have done any good at all, it has heen as we were servants of a system too vast for us to comprehend. We get along through life happily between clouds and sunshine, forgetting ourselves in our employments or our amusements, and so long as we can lose our consciousness in activity we can struggle on to the end. But when the end comes, when the life is lived and done, and stands there face to face with us; or if the heart is weak, and the spell breaks too soon, as if the strange master-worker has no longer any work to offer us, and turns us off to idleness and to ourselves; in the silence then our hearts lift up their voices, and cry out they can find no rest here, no home. Neither pleasure, nor rank, nor money, nor success in life, as it is called, have satisfied, or can satisfy; and either earth has nothing at all which answers to our cravings, or else it is something different from all these, which we have missed finding — this peace which passes understanding — and from which in the heyday of hope we had turned away, as lacking the meretricious charm which then seemed most alluring. I am not sermonizing of Religion, or of God, or of Heaven, at least not directly.”
James Anthony Froude (1818–1894) said by 1894 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Long devotions are a weariness to healthy children. If, unhappily, they have been made unhealthy — if they have been taught to look into themselves, and made to imagine themselves miserable and fallen, and every moment exciting God's anger, and so need these long devotions — their premature sensibility will exhaust itself over comparative trifles; and, by and by, when the real occasion comes, they will find that, like people who talk of common things in superlatives, their imagination will have wasted what will then be really needed. Their present state will explain to themselves the unreality of their former state; but the heart will have used out its power, and thoughts, which have been made unreal, by an unreal use of them, will be unreal still, and for ever.”
James Anthony Froude (1818–1894) said by 1894 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Belief is the result of the proportion, whatever it he, in which the many elements which go to make the human being are combined. In some the grosser nature preponderates; they believe largely in their stomachs, in the comforts and conveniences of life, and being of such kind, so long as these are not threatened, they gravitate steadily towards the earth. Numerically this is the largest class of believers, with very various denominations indeed; bearing the names of every faith beneath the sky, and composing the conservative elements in them, and therefore commonly persons of much weight in established systems. But they are what I have called them: their hearts are where I said they were, and as such interests are commonly selfish, and self separates instead of unites, they are not generally powerful against any heavy trial. Others of keener susceptibility are yet volatile, with slight power of continuance, and fly from attraction to attraction in the current of novelty. Others of stronger temper gravitate more slowly, but combine more firmly, and only disunite again when the idea or soul of the body into which they form dies out, or they fall under the influence of some very attractive force indeed. It may be doubted, indeed, whether a body which is really organised by a living idea can lose a healthy member except by violence.”
James Anthony Froude (1818–1894) said by 1894 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Once in our lives we have all to choose. More or less we have all felt once the same emotions. We have not always been what the professions make of us. Nature made us men, and she surrenders not her children without a struggle. I will go back to my story now with but this one word, that it is these sons of genius, and the fate they meet with, which is to me the one sole evidence that there is more in "this huge state" than what is seen, and that in very truth 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. For what are they? Say not, say not, it is but a choice which they have made; and an immortality of glory in heaven shall reward them for what they have sacrificed on earth. It may be so; but they do not ask for it. They are what they are from the Divine power which is in them, and you would never hear their complainings if the grave was the gate of annihilation.”
James Anthony Froude (1818–1894) said by 1894 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Say not they have their reward on earth in the calm satisfaction of noble desires, nobly gratified, in the sense of great works greatly done; that too may be, but neither do they ask for that. They alone never remember themselves; they know no end but to do the will which beats in their hearts' deep pulses. Ay, but for these, these few martyred heroes, it might be after all that the earth was but a huge loss-and-profit ledger book; or a toy machine some great angel had invented for the amusement of his nursery; and the storm and the sunshine but the tears and the smiles of laughter in which he and his baby cherubs dressed their faces over the grave and solemn airs of slow-paced respectability. Yes, genius alone is the Redeemer; it bears our sorrows, it is crowned with thorns for us; the children of genius are the church militant, the army of the human race. Genius is the life, the law of mankind, itself perishing, that others may take possession and enjoy. Religion, freedom, science, law, the arts, mechanical or heautiful, all which gives respectability a chance, have heen moulded out by the toil and the sweat and the blood of the faithful; who, knowing no enjoyment, were content to he the servants of their own born slaves, and wrought out the happiness of the world which despised and disowned them.”
James Anthony Froude (1818–1894) said by 1894 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Life complete, is lived in two worlds; the one inside, and the one outside. The first half of our days is spent wholly in the former; the second, if it is what it ought to be, wholly in the latter — till our education is almost finished; theories are only words to us, and church controversy is not of things but of shadows of things. Through all that time life and thought beyond our own experience is but a great game played out by book actors; we do not think, we only think we think, and we have been too busy in our own line to have a notion really of what is beyond it. But while so much of our talk is so unreal, our own selves, our own risings, fallings, aspirings, resolutions, misgivings, these are real enough to us; these are our hidden life, our sanctuary of our own mysteries.”
James Anthony Froude (1818–1894) said by 1894 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Happily I had very early learned the fallacy of building much on logic and verbal argument. Single sets of truths I knew to be as little conclusive in theology as in physics; and, in one as in the other, no theory to be worth anything, however plausibly backed up with Scripture texts or facts, which was not gathered bona fide from the analysis of all the attainable phenomena, and verified wherever possible by experiment. "Here is a theory of the world which you bring for my acceptance: well, there is the world; try — will the key fit? can you read the language into sense by it?" was the only method; and so I was led always to look at broad results, at pages and chapters, rather than at single words and sentences, where for a few lines a false key may serve to make a meaning. So of these broad observations I only expected a broad solution.”
James Anthony Froude (1818–1894) said by 1894 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“How can we help loving best those who first gave us possession of ourselves? All the day long they were together: living as they did, they could not help being so; only parting at night for a few short hours to dream over the happy past day, and to meet again the next morning, the happier for their brief separation. It was a new life to him: what had often hung before him as a fairy vision — what he had longed for, but never found; and here, as if sent down from heaven, was what more than answered to his wildest dreams. Now for the first time he found himself loved for himself — slighted and neglected as he had been .... suddenly he was singled out by a fascinating woman, who made no secret of the pleasure his friendship gave her.”
James Anthony Froude (1818–1894) said by 1894 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Some few intense enjoyments are given us in life; among them all, perhaps, there is none with so deep a charm as to sit by the side of those we love, and watch them sleeping. Sleep is so innocent, so peaceful in its mystery and its helplessness; and sitting there we can fancy ourselves the guardian angels holding off the thousand evils imagination paints for ever hanging over what is most precious, most dear to us. The long deep-drawn breathing; the smile we love to hope is called up over the features by our own presence in the heart; there are no moments in life we would exchange for the few we have spent by the side of these.”
James Anthony Froude (1818–1894) said by 1894 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It is strange, when something rises before us as a possibility which we have hitherto believed to be very dreadful, we fancy it is a great crisis; that when we pass it we shall be different beings; some mighty change will have swept over our nature, and we shall lose entirely all our old selves, and become others. … Yet, when the thing, whether good or evil, is done, we find we were mistaken; we are seemingly much the same — neither much better nor worse; and then we cannot make it out; on either side there is a weakening of faith; we fancy we have been taken in; the mountain has heen in lahour, and we are perplexed to find the good less powerful than we expected, and the evil less evil.”
James Anthony Froude (1818–1894) said by 1894 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“All, all nature is harmonious, and must and shall be harmony for ever; even we, poor men, with our wild ways and frantic wrongs, and crimes, and follies, to the beings out beyond us and above us, seem, doubtless, moving on our own way under the broad dominion of universal law. The wretched only feel their wretchedness: in the universe all is beautiful. Ay, to those lofty beings, be they who they will, who look down from their starry thrones on the strange figures flitting to and fro over this earth of ours, the wild recklessness of us mortals with each other may well lose its painful interest. Why should our misdoings cause more grief to them than those of the lower animals to ourselves? Pain and pleasure are but forms of consciousness; we feel them for ourselves, and for those who are like ourselves. To man alone the doings of man are wrong; the evil which is with us dies out beyond us; we are but a part of nature, and blend with the rest in her persevering beauty. Poor consolers are such thoughts, for they are but thoughts, and, alas! our pain we feel.”
James Anthony Froude (1818–1894) said by 1894 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The student running over the records of other times finds certain salient things standing out in frightful prominence. He concludes that the substance of those times was made up of the matters most dwelt on by the annalist. He forgets that the things most noticed are not those of every-day experience, but the abnormal, the extraordinary, the monstrous. The exceptions are noted down, the common and usual is passed over in silence. The philosophic historian, studying hereafter this present age, in which we are ourselves living, may say that it was a time of unexampled prosperity, luxury, and wealth; but catching at certain horrible murders which have lately disgraced our civilisation, may call us a nation of assassins. It is to invert the pyramid and stand it on its point. The same system of belief which produced the tragedy which I have described, in its proper province as the guide of ordinary life, has been the immediate cause of all that is best and greatest in Scottish character.”
James Anthony Froude (1818–1894) said by 1894 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“You have the misfortune to possess a soil and climate of unexampled excellence, and a position on the globe the most attractive to every ambitious and aggressive Power. The independence of South Africa will come when you can reply to these Powers with shot and shell (vociferous cheering); and you will do that when you have ceased to turn your energies into the most immediate and easy way of making money for yourselves, and have set heartily to work to bring out the resources of your soil. I honour and admire the achievement of national independence, because it can be achieved only by courage and self-denial and hardihood of habit of life.”
James Anthony Froude (1818–1894) first seen 1875 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Speech to the Dutch in Bloemfontein, South Africa (1875), quoted in William Greswell, Our South African Empire, Vol. I (1885), p. 229
“The landlord may become a direct oppressor. He may care nothing for the people, and have no object but to squeeze the most that he can out of them fairly or unfairly. The Russian government has been called despotism tempered with assassination. In Ireland landlordism was tempered by assassination. Unfortunately the wrong man was generally assassinated. The true criminal was an absentee, and his agent was shot instead of him. A noble lord living in England, two of whose agents had lost their lives already in his service, ordered the next to post a notice in his Barony that he intended to persevere in what he was doing, and if the tenants thought they would intimidate him by shooting his agents, they would find themselves mistaken.”
James Anthony Froude (1818–1894) first seen 1876 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: On the Uses of a Landed Gentry" address in Edinburgh (6 November 1876), published in Short Studies on Great Subjects, Vol. III (1893), p. 406
“A natural right to liberty, irrespective of the ability to defend it, exists in nations as much as and no more than it exists in individuals. Had nature meant us to live uncontrolled by any will but our own, we should have been so constructed that the pleasures of one would not interfere with the pleasures of another, or that each of us would discharge by instinct those duties which the welfare of the community requires from all. In a world in which we are made to depend so largely for our well-being on the conduct of our neighbours, and yet are created infinitely unequal in ability and worthiness of character, the superior part has a natural right to govern; the inferior part has a natural right to be governed; and a rude but adequate test of superiority and inferiority is provided in the relative strength of the different orders of human beings.”
James Anthony Froude (1818–1894) said by 1894 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Among wild beasts and savages might constitutes right. Among reasonable beings right is for ever tending to create might. Inferiority of numbers is compensated by superior cohesiveness, intelligence, and daring. The better sort of men submit willingly to be governed by those who are nobler and wiser than themselves; organization creates superiority of force; and the ignorant and the selfish may be and are justly compelled for their own advantage to obey a rule which rescues them from their natural weakness. There neither is nor can be an inherent privilege in any person or set of persons to live unworthily at their own wills, when they can be led or driven into more honourable courses; and the rights of man—if such rights there be—are not to liberty, but to wise direction and control.”
James Anthony Froude (1818–1894) said by 1894 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The independence of nations is spoken of sometimes as if it rested on another foundation—as if each separate race or community had a divine titledeed to dispose of its own fortunes, and develop its tendencies in such direction as seems good to itself. But the assumption breaks down before the enquiry, What constitutes a nation? And the right of a people to self-government consists and can consist in nothing but their power to defend themselves. No other definition is possible. Are geographical boundaries, is a distinct frontier, made the essential? Mountain chains, rivers, or seas form, no doubt, the normal dividing lines between nation and nation, because they are elements of strength, and material obstacles to invasion. But as the absence of a defined frontier cannot take away a right to liberty where there is strength to maintain it, a mountain barrier conveys no prerogative against a power which is powerful enough to overleap that barrier, nor the ocean against those whose larger skill and courage can convert the ocean into a highway.”
James Anthony Froude (1818–1894) said by 1894 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Where freedom is so precious that without it life is unendurable, men with those convictions fight too fiercely to be permanently subdued. Truth grows by its own virtue, and falsehood sinks and fades. An oppressed cause, when it is just, attracts friends, and commands moral support, which converts itself sooner or later into material strength. As a broad principle it may be said, that as nature has so constituted us that we must be ruled in some way, and as at any given time the rule inevitably will be in the hands of those who are then the strongest, so nature also has allotted superiority of strength to superiority of intellect and character; and in deciding that the weaker shall obey the more powerful, she is in reality saving them from themselves, and then most confers true liberty when she seems most to be taking it away. There is no freedom possible to man except in obedience to law; and those who cannot prescribe a law to themselves, if they desire to be free must be content to accept direction from others.”
James Anthony Froude (1818–1894) said by 1894 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The right to resist depends on the power of resistance. A nation which can maintain its independence possesses already, unless assisted by extraordinary advantages of situation, the qualities which conquest can only justify itself by conferring. It may be held to be as good in all essential conditions as the nation which is endeavouring to overcome it; and human society has rather lost than gained when a people loses its freedom which knows how to make a wholesome use of freedom. But when resistance has been tried and failed—when the inequality has been proved beyond dispute by long and painful experience—the wisdom, and ultimately the duty, of the weaker party is to accept the benefits which are offered in exchange for submission: and a nation which at once will not defend its liberties in the field, nor yet allow itself to be governed, but struggles to preserve the independence which it wants the spirit to uphold in arms by insubordination and anarchy and secret crime, may bewail its wrongs in wild and weeping eloquence in the ears of mankind,—may at length, in a time when the methods by which sterner ages repressed this kind of conduct are unpermitted, make itself so intolerable as to be cast off and bidden go upon its own bad way: but it will not go for its own benefit. It will have established no principle, and vindicated no natural right. Liberty profits only those who can govern themselves better than others can govern them, and those who are able to govern themselves wisely have no need to petition for a privilege which they can keep or take for themselves.”
James Anthony Froude (1818–1894) said by 1894 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source