Quotes from James Anthony Froude

Superior strength is found in the long run to lie with those who had right on their side.

Just laws are no restraint upon the freedom of the good, for the good man desires nothing which a just law will interfere with.

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.

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

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

Men think to mend their condition by a change of circumstances. They might as well hope to escape from their shadows.

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.

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

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.

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.

You cannot dream yourself into a character; you must hammer and forge yourself one.

Experience teaches slowly, and at the cost of mistakes.

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.

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.

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

Crime is not punished as an offense against God, but as prejudicial to society.

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

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.

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.

The first duty of an historian is to be on guard against his own sympathies.

A person possessed with an idea cannot be reasoned with.

We must have the real thing before we can have a science of a thing.

I think there is a spiritual scent in us which feels mischief coming, as they say birds scent storms.

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.