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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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James Anthony Froude
Age: 75 †
Born: 1818
Born: April 23
Died: 1894
Died: January 1
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Essayist
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Dartington
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Heroic

More quotes by 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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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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Where nature is sovereign, there is no need of austerity and self-denial.
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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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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To tell men that they cannot help themselves is to fling them into recklessness and despair.
James Anthony Froude
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What is called virtue in the common sense of the word has nothing to do with this or that man's prosperity, or even happiness.
James Anthony Froude
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The better one is morally the less aware they are of their virtue.
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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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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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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Instruction does not prevent wasted time or mistakes and mistakes themselves are often the best teachers of all.
James Anthony Froude
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The essence of greatness is neglect of the self.
James Anthony Froude
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Where all are selfish, the sage is no better than the fool, and only rather more dangerous.
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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I cannot think the disputes and jealousies of Heaven are tried and settled by the swords of earth.
James Anthony Froude
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I cut a hole in my heart and wrote with the blood.
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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I am convinced with Plato , with St. Paul, with St. Augustine, with Calvin , and with Leibnitz, that this universe, and every smallest portion of it, exactly fulfils the purpose for which Almighty God designed it.
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