James Anthony Froude
Do you not think that sometimes when matters are at the worst with us, when we appear to have done all which we ourselves can do, yet all has been unavailing, and we have only shown we cannot, not we will not, help ourselves; that often just then something comes, almost as if supernaturally, to settle for us, as if our guardian angel took pity on our perplexities, and then at last obtained leave to help us? And if it be so, then what might only be a coincidence becomes a call of Providence, a voice from Heaven, a command.Collection: Angel
Fling away your soul once for all, your own small self; if you will find it again. Count not even on immortality.Collection: Self
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.Collection: Plato
You cannot reason people into loving those whom they are not drawn to love; they cannot reason themselves into it; and there are some contrarieties of temper which are too strong even for the obligations of relationship.Collection: Strong
Charity is from person to person; and it loses half, far more than half, its moral value when the giver is not brought into personal relation with those to whom he gives.Collection: Giving
We are complex, and therefore, in our natural state, inconsistent, beings, and the opinion of this hour need not be the opinion of the next.Collection: Needs
Morality, when vigorously alive, sees farther than intellect, and provides unconsciously for intellectual difficulties.Collection: Intellectual
Truth only smells sweet forever, and illusions, however innocent, are deadly as the canker worm.Collection: Sweet
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.Collection: Real
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.Collection: Spring
The superstition of science scoffs at the superstition of faith.Collection: Faith
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.Collection: Heart
Men think to mend their condition by a change of circumstances. They might as well hope to escape from their shadows.Collection: Men
A single seed of fact will produce in a season or two a harvest of calumnies; but sensible men will pay no attention to them.Collection: Men
Where nature is sovereign, there is no need of austerity and self-denial.Collection: Nature
Morality rests upon a sense of obligation; and obligation has no meaning except as implying a Divine command, without which it would cease to be.Collection: Morality
To tell men that they cannot help themselves is to fling them into recklessness and despair.Collection: Men
I would sooner perish for ever than stoop down before a Being who may have power to crush me, but whom my heart forbids me to reverence.Collection: Crush
We call heaven our home, as the best name we know to give it.Collection: Home
I have long been convinced that the Christian Eucharist is but a continuation of the Eleusinian mysteries. St Paul, in using the word teleiois, almost confirms this.Collection: Christian
Science rests on reason and experiment, and can meet an opponent with calmness; [but] a creed is always sensitive.Collection: Science
High original genius is always ridiculed on its first appearance; most of all by those who have won themselves the highest reputation in working on the established lines. Genius only commands recognition when it has created the taste which is to appreciate it.Collection: Appreciate
English character and English freedom depend comparatively little on the form which the Constitution assumes at Westminster. A centralised democracy may be as tyrannical as an absolute monarch; and if the vigour of the nation is to continue unimpaired, each individual, each family, each district, must preserve as far as possible its independence, its self-completeness, its powers and its privilege to manage its own affairs and think its own thoughts.Collection: Character
Nature is less partial than she appears, and all situations in life have their compensations along with them.Collection: Situations In Life
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.Collection: Men
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.Collection: Simple
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.Collection: Struggle
The moral of human life is never simple, and the moral of a story which aims only at being true to human life cannot be expected to be any more so.Collection: Simple
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.Collection: Heart
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?Collection: Men
If you think you can temper yourself into manliness by sitting here over your books, it is the very silliest fancy that ever tempted a young man to his ruin. You cannot dream yourself into a character; you must hammer and forge yourself one.Collection: Dream
Crime is not punished as an offense against God, but as prejudicial to society.Collection: Prison
Carelessness is inexcusable, and merits the inevitable sequence.Collection: Merit
Courage is, on all hands, considered as an essential of high character.Collection: Courage
The war of good and evil is mightiest in mightiest souls, and even in the darkest time the heart will maintain its right against the hardest creed.Collection: War
It may be from some moral obliquity in myself, or from some strange disease; but for me, and I should think too for every human being in whose breast a human heart is beating, to know that one single creature is in that dreadful place would make a hell of heaven itself. And they have hearts in heaven, for they love there.Collection: Heart
I scarcely know a professional man I can like, and certainly not one who has been what the world calls successful, that I should the least wish to resemble.Collection: Successful
A dreamer he was, and ever would be. Yet dreaming need not injure us, if it do but take its turn with waking; and even dreams themselves may be turned to beauty, by favoured men to whom nature has given the powers of casting them into form.Collection: Dream
We must have the real thing before we can have a science of a thing.Collection: Real
But the world was also so constructed, owing to the nature of the Maker of it, that superior strength was found in the long run to lie with those who had the right on their side.Collection: Strength
I think Nature, if she interests herself much about her children, must often feel that, like the miserable Frankenstein, with her experimenting among the elements of humanity, she has brought beings into existence who have no business here; who can do none of her work, and endure none of her favours; whose life is only suffering; and whose action is one long protest against the ill foresight which flung them into consciousness.Collection: Children
What is right or duty without power ? To tell a man it is his duty to submit his judgment to the judgment of the church, is like telling a wife it is her duty to love her husband a thing easy to say, but meaning simply nothing. Affection must be won, not commanded.Collection: Husband
Now, to a single-minded man, who is either brave enough or reckless enough to surrender himself wholly to one idea, and look neither right nor left, but only forward, what earthly consequences may follow is not material. Persecution strengthens him; and so he is sure he is right, whether his course end in a prison or on a throne is no matter at all. But men of this calibre are uncommon in any age or in any country very uncommon in this age and this country.Collection: Country
I have nothing but myself to write about, no facts, no theories, no opinions, no adventures, no sentiments, nothing but my own poor barren individualism, of considerable interest to me, but I do not know why I should presume it will be so to you. Egotism is not tiresome, or it ought not to be, if one is sincere about oneself; but it is so hard to be sincere. Well, never mind, I mean to be, and you know me well enough to see through me when I am humbugging.Collection: Writing
I believe that fallen creatures perish, perish for ever, for only good can live, and good has not been theirs; but how durst men forge our Saviour's words "eternal death " into so horrible a meaning? And even if he did use other words, and seem to countenance such a meaning for them (and what witness have we that He did, except that of men whose ignorance or prejudice might well have interpreted these words wrongly as they did so many others?Collection: Believe
I cut a hole in my heart and wrote with the blood.Collection: Heart
Sacrifice is the first element of religion, and resolves itself in theological language into the love of God.Collection: Sacrifice