James Anthony Froude

James Anthony Froude
James Anthony Froude FRSEwas an English historian, novelist, biographer, and editor of Fraser's Magazine. From his upbringing amidst the Anglo-Catholic Oxford Movement, Froude intended to become a clergyman, but doubts about the doctrines of the Anglican church, published in his scandalous 1849 novel The Nemesis of Faith, drove him to abandon his religious career. Froude turned to writing history, becoming one of the best known historians of his time for his History of England from the Fall of Wolsey to...
NationalityEnglish
ProfessionHistorian
Date of Birth23 April 1818
James Anthony Froude quotes about
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.
Justice without wisdom is impossible.
The secret of a person's nature lies in their religion and what they really believes about the world and their place in it.
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.
The better one is morally the less aware they are of their virtue.
Those who seek for something more than happiness in this world must not complain if happiness is not their portion.
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.
Courage is, on all hands, considered as an essential of high character.
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.
Sacrifice is the first element of religion, and resolves itself in theological language into the love of God.
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.
Our human laws are but the copies, more or less imperfect, of the eternal laws, so far as we can read them.
The first duty of an historian is to be on guard against his own sympathies.
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.