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C.N. Douglas, comp. Forty Thousand Quotations: Prose and Poetical. 1917.

Froude

  • Thirst of power and of riches now bear sway,
  • The passion and infirmity of age.
  • Thy plain and open nature sees mankind
  • But in appearance, not what they are.
  • 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.

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

    Carelessness is inexcusable, and merits the inevitable sequence.

    Courage is, on all hands, considered as an essential of high character.

    Experience is no more transferable in morals than in art.

    Experience teaches slowly, and at the cost of mistakes.

    Fear is the parent of cruelty.

    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.

    Human improvement is from within outward.

    If you think you can temper yourself into manliness by sitting there 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.

    Ignorance is the dominion of absurdity.

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

    In every department of life—in its business and in its pleasures, in its beliefs and in its theories, in its material developments and in its spiritual connections—we thank God that we are not like our fathers.

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

    Justice without wisdom is impossible.

    Men are made by nature unequal. It is vain, therefore, to treat them as if they were equal.

    Men possessed with an idea cannot be reasoned with.

    Morality, when vigorously alive, sees farther than intellect, and provides unconsciously for intellectual difficulties.

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

    Our human laws are but the copies, more or less imperfect, of the eternal laws so far as we can read them.

    Philosophy goes no further than probabilities, and in every assertion keeps doubt in reserve.

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

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

    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.

    The moral law is written on the tablets of eternity. For every false word or unrighteous deed, for cruelty and oppression, for lust or vanity, the price has to be paid at last.

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

    The secret of a man’s nature lies in his religion, in what he really believes about this world and his own place in it.

    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.

    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.

    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.

    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.

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

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

    To deny the freedom of the will is to make morality impossible.

    To tell men that they cannot help themselves is to fling them into recklessness and despair.

    Truth only smells sweet forever, and illusions, however innocent, are deadly as the canker worm.

    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.

    We enter the world alone, we leave it alone.

    Where all are selfish, the sage is no better than the fool, and only rather more dangerous.

    Where nature is sovereign, there is no need of austerity and self-denial.