James Anthony Froude Quotes

You cannot dream yourself into a character; you must hammer and forge yourself one.

Human improvement is from within outward.

As we advance in life, we learn the limits of our abilities.

The essence of greatness is neglect of the self.

The trials of life will not wait for us. They come at their own time, not caring much to inquire how ready we may be to meet them.

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.

Men are made by nature unequal. It is vain, therefore, to treat them as if they were equal.

Experience teaches slowly, and at the cost of mistakes.

Every one of us ... knows better than he practices, and recognizes a better law than he obeys.

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 .

I believe in God, not because the Bible tells me that he is, but because my heart tells me so; and the same heart tells me we can only have His peace with us if we love Him and obey Him, and that we can only he happy when we each love our neighbour better than ourselves.

Mistakes are often the best teachers.

To be happy is not the purpose for which you are placed in this world.

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.

Of all the evil spirits abroad at this hour in the world, insincerity is the most dangerous.

There is always a part of our being into which those who are dearer to us far than our own lives are yet unable to enter.

History is a voice forever sounding across the centuries the laws of right and wrong. Opinions alter, manners change, creeds rise and fall, but the moral law is written on the tablets of eternity.

Instruction does not prevent wasted time or mistakes; and mistakes themselves are often the best teachers of all.

A person possessed with an idea cannot be reasoned with.

The practical effect of a belief is the real test of its soundness.

Justice without wisdom is impossible.

The first duty of an historian is to be on his guard against his own sympathies...

We read the past by the light of the present, and the forms vary as the shadows fall, or as the point of vision alters.

Fear is the parent of cruelty.

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.