James Anthony Froude

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.

For me this world was neither so high nor so low as the Church would have it; chequered over with its wild light shadows, I could love it and all the children of it, more dearly, perhaps, because it was not all light.

I begin to look about me to listen to what had to be said on many sides of the question, and try, as far as I could, to give it all fair hearing.

It was brought home to me that two men may be as sincere, as earnest, as faithful, as uncompromising, and yet hold opinions far asunder as the poles.

Happily I had very early learned the fallacy of building much on logic and verbal argument.

we do not think, we only think we think, and we have been too busy in our own line to have a notion really of what is beyond it.

Life complete, is lived in two worlds; the one inside, and the one outside.

Yes, genius alone is the Redeemer; it bears our sorrows, it is crowned with thorns for us; the children of genius are the church militant, the army of the human race.

Say not they have their reward on earth in the calm satisfaction of noble desires, nobly gratified, in the sense of great works greatly done; that too may be, but neither do they ask for that. They alone never remember themselves; they …

Say not, say not, it is but a choice which they have made; and an immortality of glory in heaven shall reward them for what they have sacrificed on earth. It may be so; but they do not ask for it. They are what they are from the Divine …

Nature made us men, and she surrenders not her children without a struggle.

Once in our lives we have all to choose. More or less we have all felt once the same emotions.

Look not to have your sepulchre built in after ages hy the same foolish hands which still ever destroy the living prophet. Small honour for you if they do build it; and may be they never will build it.

Fling away your soul once for all, your own small self; if you will find it again. Count not even on immortality.

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.

Others of stronger temper gravitate more slowly, but combine more firmly, and only disunite again when the idea or soul of the body into which they form dies out, or they fall under the influence of some very attractive force indeed. It …

Numerically this is the largest class of believers, with very various denominations indeed; bearing the names of every faith beneath the sky, and composing the conservative elements in them, and therefore commonly persons of much weight in …

Belief is the result of the proportion, whatever it he, in which the many elements which go to make the human being are combined.

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 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 …

Woe to the unlucky man who as a child is taught, even as a portion of his creed, what his grown reason must forswear.

their premature sensibility will exhaust itself over comparative trifles; and, by and by, when the real occasion comes, they will find that, like people who talk of common things in superlatives, their imagination will have wasted what …

Long devotions are a weariness to healthy children.

You will never have perfect men, Plato says, till you have perfect circumstances.