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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.

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
Power
Track
Littles
Spring
Panoply
Ideas
Unless
Sowed
Little
Growth
Scepticism
Like
Full
Springs
Wisdom
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Brain
Seeds
Idea
Profit

More quotes by 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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The best that we can do for one another is to exchange our thoughts freely and that, after all, is about all.
James Anthony Froude
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Crime is not punished as an offense against God, but as prejudicial to society.
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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You cannot reason people into loving those whom they are not drawn to love they cannot reason themselves into it and there are some contrarieties of temper which are too strong even for the obligations of relationship.
James Anthony Froude
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A single seed of fact will produce in a season or two a harvest of calumnies but sensible men will pay no attention to them.
James Anthony Froude
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Life is more than a theory, and love of truth butters no bread: old men who have had to struggle along their way, who know the endless bitterness, the grave moral deterioration which follow an empty exchequer, may well be pardoned for an over-wish to see their sons secured from it hunger, at least, is a reality.
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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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.
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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Women's eyes are rapid in detecting a heart which is ill at ease with itself, and, knowing the value of sympathy, and finding their own greatest happiness not in receiving it, but in giving it, with them to be unhappy is at once to be interesting.
James Anthony Froude
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Every one of us ... knows better than he practices, and recognizes a better law than he obeys.
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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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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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
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Fear is the parent of cruelty.
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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The essence of greatness is neglect of the self.
James Anthony Froude
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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.
James Anthony Froude
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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.
James Anthony Froude