Quotes from James G. Frazer

I am a plain practical man, not one of your theorists and splitters of hairs and choppers of logic.

Yet perhaps no sacrifice is wholly useless which proves there are men who prefer honour to life.

The consideration of human suffering is not one which enters into the calculations of primitive man.

The awe and dread with which the untutored savage contemplates his mother-in-law are amongst the most familiar facts of anthropology.

The custom of burning a beneficent god is too foreign to later modes of thought to escape misinterpretation.

By religion, then, I understand a propitiation or conciliation of powers superior to man which are believed to direct and control the course of nature and of human life.

Indeed the influence of music on the development of religion is a subject which would repay a sympathetic study.

The second principle of magic: things which have once been in contact with each other continue to act on each other at a distance after the physical contact has been severed.

Even the recognition of an individual whom we see every day is only possible as the result of an abstract idea of him formed by generalization from his appearances in the past.

It is a common rule with primitive people not to waken a sleeper, because his soul is away and might not have time to get back.

The slow, the never ending approach to truth consists in perpetually forming and testing hypotheses, accepting those at which at the time seem to fit the facts and rejecting the others.

The question whether our conscious personality survives after death has been answered by almost all races of men in the affirmative.

The man of science, like the man of letters, is too apt to view mankind only in the abstract, selecting in his consideration only a single side of our complex and many-sided being.

Man has created gods in his own likeness and being himself mortal he has naturally supposed his creatures to be in the same sad predicament.

The world cannot live at the level of its great men.

The advance of knowledge is an infinite progression towards a goal that ever recedes.