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The essence of greatness is neglect of the self.

James Anthony Froude

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James Anthony Froude
Age: 75 †
Born: 1818
Born: April 23
Died: 1894
Died: January 1
Biographer
Deacon
Essayist
Historian
Novelist
Translator
University Teacher
Dartington
Devon
Self
Transcendentalism
Neglect
Acceptance
Greatness
Essence

More quotes by James Anthony Froude

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The practical effect of a belief is the real test of its soundness. Where we find a heroic life appearing as the uniform fruit of a particular mode of opinion, it is childish to argue in the face of fact that the result ought to have been different.
James Anthony Froude
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If you think you can temper yourself into manliness by sitting here over your books, it is the very silliest fancy that ever tempted a young man to his ruin. You cannot dream yourself into a character you must hammer and forge yourself one.
James Anthony Froude
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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.
James Anthony Froude
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Human improvement is from within outward.
James Anthony Froude
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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.
James Anthony Froude
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To tell men that they cannot help themselves is to fling them into recklessness and despair.
James Anthony Froude
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The solitary side of our nature demands leisure for reflection upon subjects on which the dash and whirl of daily business, so long as its clouds rise thick about us, forbid the intellect to fasten itself.
James Anthony Froude
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The endurance of the inequalities of life by the poor is the marvel of human society.
James Anthony Froude
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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.
James Anthony Froude
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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?
James Anthony Froude
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The practical effect of a belief is the real test of its soundness.
James Anthony Froude
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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.
James Anthony Froude
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Those who seek for something more than happiness in this world must not complain if happiness is not their portion.
James Anthony Froude
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The moral of human life is never simple, and the moral of a story which aims only at being true to human life cannot be expected to be any more so.
James Anthony Froude
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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.
James Anthony Froude
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We live merely on the crust or rind of things.
James Anthony Froude
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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.
James Anthony Froude
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Carelessness is inexcusable, and merits the inevitable sequence.
James Anthony Froude
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True greatness is the most ready to recognize and most willing to obey those simple outward laws which have been sanctioned by the experience of mankind.
James Anthony Froude
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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 .
James Anthony Froude