James Anthony Froude Quotes

Those who seek for something more than happiness in this world must not complain if happiness is not their portion.

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

Fear is the parent of cruelty.

We enter the world alone, we leave it alone.

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

No person is ever good for much, that hasn't been swept off their feet by enthusiasm between ages twenty and thirty

Mistakes are often the best teachers.

Experience teaches slowly, and at the cost of mistakes.

We cannot live on probabilities. The faith in which we can live bravely and die in peace must be a certainty, so far as it professes to be a faith at all, or it is nothing.

Science rests on reason and experiment, and can meet an opponent with calmness; [but] a creed is always sensitive.

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.

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

Nature is not a partisan, but out of her ample treasue house she produces children in infinite variety, of which she is equally the mother, and disowns none of them.

The best that we can do for one another is to exchange our thoughts freely; and that, after all, is about all.

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

Sacrifice is the first element of religion, and resolves itself in theological language into the love of God.

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.

In everyday things the law of sacrifice takes the form of positive duty.

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

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