James G. Frazer Quotes

The advance of knowledge is an infinite progression towards a goal that ever recedes.

The second principle of magic: things which have once been in contact with each other continue to act on each other at a distance after the physical contact has been severed.

Small minds cannot grasp great ideas; to their narrow comprehension, their purblind vision, nothing seems really great and important but themselves.

From the earliest times man has been engaged in a search for general rules whereby to turn the order of natural phenomena to his own advantage, and in the long search he has scraped together a great hoard of such maxims, some of them golden and some of them mere dross. The true or golden rules constitute the body of applied science which we call the arts; the false are magic.

The world cannot live at the level of its great men.

Man has created gods in his own likeness and being himself mortal he has naturally supposed his creatures to be in the same sad predicament.

It is a common rule with primitive people not to waken a sleeper, because his soul is away and might not have time to get back.

The question whether our conscious personality survives after death has been answered by almost all races of men in the affirmative.

For there are strong grounds for thinking that, in the evolution of thought, magic has preceded religion.

If mankind had always been logical and wise, history would not be a long chronicle of folly and crime.

In course of time the slow advance of knowledge, which has dispelled so many cherished illusions, convinced at least the more thoughtful portion of mankind that the alterations of summer and winter, of spring and autumn, were not merely the result of their own magical rites, but that some deeper cause, some mightier power, was at work behind the shifting scenes of nature.

In point of fact magicians appear to have often developed into chiefs and kings.

For when a nation becomes civilized, if it does not drop human sacrifices altogether, it at least selects as victims only such wretches as would be put to death at any rate. Thus the killing of a god may sometimes come to be confounded with the execution of a criminal.

By religion, then, I understand a propitiation or conciliation of powers superior to man which are believed to direct and control the course of nature and of human life.

The slow, the never ending approach to truth consists in perpetually forming and testing hypotheses, accepting those at which at the time seem to fit the facts and rejecting the others.

With the advance of knowledge, therefore, prayer and sacrifice assume the leading place in religious ritual; and magic; which once ranked with them as a legitimate equal, is gradually relegated to the background and sinks to the level of a black art.

Even the recognition of an individual whom we see every day is only possible as the result of an abstract idea of him formed by generalization from his appearances in the past.

In primitive society, where uniformity of occupation is the rule, and the distribution of the community into various classes of workers has hardly begun, every man is more or less his own magician; he practices charms and incantations for his own good and the injury of his enemies.

The man of science, like the man of letters, is too apt to view mankind only in the abstract, selecting in his consideration only a single side of our complex and many-sided being.

Hence the strong attraction which magic and science alike have exercised on the human mind; hence the powerful stimulus that both have given to the pursuit of knowledge. They lure the weary enquirer, the footsore seeker, on through the wilderness of disappointment in the present by their endless promises of the future: they take him up to the top of an exceeding high mountain and show him, beyond the dark clouds and rolling mists at his feet, a vision of the celestial city, far off, it may be, but radiant with unearthly splendour, bathed in the light of dreams.

Some of the old laws of Israel are clearly savage taboos of a familiar type thinly disguised as commands of the Deity.

I am a plain practical man, not one of your theorists and splitters of hairs and choppers of logic.

The old notion that the savage is the freest of mankind is the reverse of the truth. He is a slave, not indeed to a visible master, but to the past, to the spirits of his dead forefathers, who haunt his steps from birth to death, and rule him with a rod of iron.

But once a fool always a fool, and the greater the power in his hands the more disastrous is likely to be the use he makes of it. The heaviest calamity in English history, the breach with America, might never have occurred if George the Third had not been an honest dullard.

This doctrine of transmigration or reincarnation of the soul is found among many tribes of savages