James G. Frazer Quotations

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.

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

If mankind had always been logical and wise, history would not be a long chronicle of folly and crime.

In course of time the slow advance of knowledge, which has dispelled so many cherished illusions, convinced at least the more thoughtful portion of mankind that the alterations of summer and winter, of spring and autumn, were not merely the result of their own magical rites, but that some deeper cause, some mightier power, was at work behind the shifting scenes of nature.

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

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.

With the advance of knowledge, therefore, prayer and sacrifice assume the leading place in religious ritual; and magic; which once ranked with them as a legitimate equal, is gradually relegated to the background and sinks to the level of a black art.

In point of fact magicians appear to have often developed into chiefs and kings.

The moral world is as little exempt as the physical world from the law of ceaseless change, of perpetual flux.

The scapegoat upon whom the sins of the people are periodically laid, may also be a human being.