James Anthony Froude
Superior strength is found in the long run to lie with those who had right on their side.Collection: Strength
We enter the world alone, we leave the world alone.Collection: Alone
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.Collection: Death
Age does not make us childish, as some say; it finds us true children.Collection: Age
In everyday things the law of sacrifice takes the form of positive duty.Collection: Positive
Fear is the parent of cruelty.Collection: Fear
The first duty of an historian is to be on guard against his own sympathies.Collection: Sympathy
A person possessed with an idea cannot be reasoned with.Collection: Imagination
Human improvement is from within outward.
You cannot dream yourself into a character; you must hammer and forge yourself one.
Experience teaches slowly, and at the cost of mistakes.
As we advance in life, we learn the limits of our abilities.
Instruction does not prevent wasted time or mistakes; and mistakes themselves are often the best teachers of all.
The practical effect of a belief is the real test of its soundness.
No person is ever good for much, that hasn't been swept off their feet by enthusiasm between ages twenty and thirty.
The essence of greatness is neglect of the self.
The better one is morally the less aware they are of their virtue.
Philosophy goes no further than probabilities, and in every assertion keeps a doubt in reserve.
Science rests on reason and experiment, and can meet an opponent with calmness; but a belief is always sensitive.
To deny the freedom of the will is to make morality impossible.
The secret of a person's nature lies in their religion and what they really believes about the world and their place in it.
The endurance of the inequalities of life by the poor is the marvel of human society.
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.Collection: Caring
Men are made by nature unequal. It is vain, therefore, to treat them as if they were equal.Collection: Nature
Every one of us ... knows better than he practices, and recognizes a better law than he obeys.Collection: Practice
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 .Collection: Real
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.Collection: Believe
Mistakes are often the best teachers.Collection: Teacher
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.Collection: Fall
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.Collection: Solitude
To be happy is not the purpose for which you are placed in this world.Collection: Happiness
The best that we can do for one another is to exchange our thoughts freely; and that, after all, is about all.Collection: Education
Of all the evil spirits abroad at this hour in the world, insincerity is the most dangerous.Collection: Evil
Justice without wisdom is impossible.Collection: Wisdom
The first duty of an historian is to be on his guard against his own sympathies...Collection: Firsts
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.Collection: Fall
Where all are selfish, the sage is no better than the fool, and only rather more dangerous.Collection: Selfish
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.Collection: Heart
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.Collection: Men
Just laws are no restraint upon the freedom of the good, for the good man desires nothing which a just law will interfere with.Collection: Men
The soul of man is not a thing which comes and goes, is builded and decays like the elemental frame in which it is set to dwell, but a very living force, a very energy of God's organic will, which rules and moulds this universe.Collection: Men
The Providence that watches over the affairs of men works out of their mistakes, at times, a healthier issue than could have been accomplished by their wisest forethought.Collection: Mistake
Life is change, to cease to change is to cease to live; yet if you may shed a tear beside the death-bed of an old friend, let not your heart be silent on the dissolving of a faith.Collection: Heart
Ignorance is the dominion of absurdity.Collection: Ignorance
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.Collection: Reflection
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.Collection: Faith
That which especially distinguishes a high order of man from a low order of man, that which constitutes human goodness, human nobleness, is surely not the degree of enlightenment with which men pursue their own advantage; but it is self-forgetfulness; it is self-sacrifice; it is the disregard of personal pleasure, personal indulgence, personal advantage, remote or present, because some other line of conduct is more right.Collection: Sacrifice
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.Collection: Flower
Those who seek for something more than happiness in this world must not complain if happiness is not their portion.Collection: Happiness
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.Collection: House