James Anthony Froude Art Quotations

I believe in God, not because the Bible tells me that he is, but because my heart tells me so; and the same heart tells me we can only have His peace with us if we love Him and obey Him, and that we can only he happy when we each love our neighbour better than ourselves.

Who shall say that those poor peasants were not acting in the spirit we most venerate, most adore; that theirs was not the true heart language which we cannot choose but love? And what has been their reward? They have sent down their name to be the by-word of all after ages; the worst reproach of the worst men a name convertible with atheism and devil-worship.

Once, once for all, if you would save your heart from breaking, learn this lesson once for all you must cease, in this world, to believe in the eternity of any creed or form at all. Whatever grows in time is a child of time, and is born and lives, and dies at its appointed day like ourselves.

Experience is no more transferable in morals than in art.

I cut a hole in my heart and wrote with the blood .

I would sooner perish for ever than stoop down before a Being who may have power to crush me, but whom my heart forbids me to reverence.

Life is change, to cease to change is to cease to live; yet if you may shed a tear beside the death-bed of an old friend, let not your heart be silent on the dissolving of a faith.

I cannot think the disputes and jealousies of Heaven are tried and settled by the swords of earth.

It may be from some moral obliquity in myself, or from some strange disease; but for me, and I should think too for every human being in whose breast a human heart is beating, to know that one single creature is in that dreadful place would make a hell of heaven itself. And they have hearts in heaven, for they love there.

The war of good and evil is mightiest in mightiest souls, and even in the darkest time the heart will maintain its right against the hardest creed.

Women's eyes are rapid in detecting a heart which is ill at ease with itself, and, knowing the value of sympathy, and finding their own greatest happiness not in receiving it, but in giving it, with them to be unhappy is at once to be interesting.

To be enthusiastic about doing much with human nature is a foolish business indeed; and, throwing himself into his work as he was doing, and expecting so much from it, would not the tide ebb as strongly as it was flowing? It is a rash game this setting our hearts on any future beyond what we have our own selves control over. Things do not walk as we settle with ourselves they ought to walk, and to hope is almost the correlative of to be disappointed.

When a woman's heart is flowing over for the first time with deep and passionate love, she is all love. Every faculty of her soul rushes together in the intensity of the one feeling; thought, reflection, conscience, duty, the past, the future, they are names to her light as the breath which speaks them; her soul is full.

That in these times every serious person should not in his heart have felt some difliculty with the doctrines of the incarnation, I cannot helieve. We are not as we were. When Christianity was first published, the imagination of mankind presented the relation of heaven to earth very differently from what it does now.