Frazer Quotes & Sayings

the fear of the human dead, which, on the whole, I believe to have been probably the most powerful force in the making of primitive religion. — James George Frazer

I have this clutter of questions all churned together in my mind and they won't stop churning. I've found out too much and not enough. there are too many pieces that could go together too many ways and I can't stop shifting them around. There has to be some way it all makes sense and it doesn't yet."
"You're asking a lot of life if you want it to make sense."
Most of the time, Joliffe was of the same opinion, but he shook his head against it now like against a fly's buzz and said nothing, frowning at the pen he was still twirling.
Basset watched him a moment, then said,
"Well, if you can't let it go, go at it as if you were trying to make a story of all these pieces you have. Shift them around and fill the gaps until they make the sense you want. — Margaret Frazer

The Ark of the Covenant is a Golden Rectangle because its rectangular shape is in the proportions of the Golden Ratio. — Donald Frazer

We never cherish what we've got until the day it's gone. — Dean Frazer

No mountain of doom,
Just foothills of Ferninand.
Towers of fire and glory as far as one can see. — Megan Frazer Blakemore

But once a fool always a fool, and the greater the power in his hands the more disastrous is likely to be the use he makes of it. The heaviest calamity in English history, the breach with America, might never have occurred if George the Third had not been an honest dullard. — James G. Frazer

Orlando said it was important for scientists to have minds kept open by literature, and souls touched by the creativity of art. — Megan Frazer Blakemore

(Man) fancied that by masquerading in leaves and flowers he helped the bare earth to clothe herself with verdure, and that by playing the death and burial of winter he drove that gloomy season away, and made smooth the path for the footsteps of returning spring. We may smile at his vain endeavours if we please, but it was only by making a long series of experiments, of which some were almost inevitably doomed to failure, that mane learned from experience the futility of some of his attempted methods and the fruitfulness of others. After all, magical ceremonies are nothing but experiments which have failed and which continue to be repeated merely because the operator is unaware of their failure. — James George Frazer

No sirens. Let Parker drive," Frazer ordered. — Toni Anderson

The Planeswalker know
YOu take the card from the library
And bury it when you're done.
On the path, you face history.
Walk the path, do the math:

Start with the prime numbers under 100
Whose digits give you 10.
Choose the happy median.
Add it to: The square root of
The cube of five divided by
The sum of 3 and 2. — Megan Frazer Blakemore

The best way to neutralise fear is by laughing. You can see the dynamics of this in action when people watch a horror movie. You'll notice that immediately after a good fright, following the sceams of terror - which is the point of maximum experience of fear - people will always laugh immediately afterward, as this is the natural way to release the fear. By laughing at something you also take away the perception that it has any power over you. — Dean Frazer

We're forever focusing upon our differences, and never noticing how much we're all alike. — Dean Frazer

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. — James G. Frazer

If the test of truth lay in a show of hands or a counting of heads, the system of magic might appeal, with far more reason than the Catholic Church, to the proud motto, Quod semper, quod ubique, quod ab omnibus [always, everywhere, and by all], as the sure and certain credential of its own infallibility. — James G. Frazer

Small minds cannot grasp great ideas; to their narrow comprehension, their purblind vision, nothing seems really great and important but themselves. — James George Frazer

Anthropologically informed works, from Sir James Frazer's Golden Bough to Pascal Boyer's Religion Explained or Scott Atran's In Gods We Trust, fascinatingly document the bizarre phenomenology of superstition and ritual. Read such books and marvel at the richness of human gullibility. But that is not — Richard Dawkins

It is only those who feel disconnected and seperated from the Oneness of All That Is that can ever commit evil deeds. — Dean Frazer

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

Ignorance is jealousy's twin sister. — Dean Frazer

The world cannot live at the level of its great men. — James G. Frazer

Yet it would be unfair to the generality of our kind to ascribe to their intellectual and moral weakness the gradual divergence of Buddhism and Christianity from their primitive patterns. For it should not be forgotten that by their glorification of poverty and celibacy both these religions struck straight at the root not merely of civil society but of human existence. The blow was parried by the wisdom or the folly of the vast majority of mankind, who refused to purchase a chance of saving their souls with the certainty of extinguishing the species. — James G. Frazer

You don't need eyes to see, you need vision. — Maxwell Frazer

Parker joined him and geared up, fast and efficient. That, and the fact Frazer was sending him out with Matt into a dangerous situation, told him the rumors were true. The guy wasn't your typical desk-jockey, computer nerd. — Toni Anderson

From the origins of humanity, their biological privilege enabled men to affirm themselves alone as sovereign subjects; they never abdicated this privilege; they alienated part of their existence in Nature and in Woman; but they won it back afterward; condemned to play the role of the Other, woman was thus condemned to possess no more than precarious power: slave or idol, she was never the one who chose her lot. "Men make gods and women worship them," said Frazer; it is men who decide if their supreme divinities will be females or males; the place of woman in society is always the one they assign her; at no time has she imposed her own law. — Simone De Beauvoir

I would've loved to have children and I'm really good with kids, but I just didn't want to commit to anything when I had cancer. I didn't want to plan for the future. — Frazer Hines

Rachel could sell cheese to vegans. — Megan Frazer Blakemore

Ephraim lifted the top of the trunk. Neatly stacked were mementoes from what seemed like hundreds of journeys. Right on top was an etching of the Eiffel tower next to an African mask that looked at him with surprised eyes. He reached in a little deeper and unearthed a small teapot decorated with blue drawings just like the kind his grandmother collected and kept in a locked china cabinet. — Megan Frazer Blakemore

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

My visage high above your city,
Shines like gold, but half as pretty.
Arms I've none, but hands I've two:
Mondo, mini, black not blue.
Climb my stairs and have no fears,
All that threatens are my gears.
Tucked beneath the mightly wheel,
An envelpe shall truth reveal. — Megan Frazer Blakemore

Like a crowd in my head, so loud.
I wonder what it's like to be dead, I hope it's quiet.
Noise in my head like a riot.
Any remedy you have for me, I'll try it. — Maxwell Frazer

Joliffe, watching him over the rim of his own bowl, felt for his discontent. In his own life there were other things he could have been besides a player
several other things he had been besides a player
but at least he had had choices and made them. He doubted this fellow had ever seen anything else to be but what he was. Or else he had refused other choices if they ever came. but staying with what you were born to was a choice, too, and the one that most people made
a choice that Joliffe could have made, too, upon a time, but had not and of that he was still glad. — Margaret Frazer

The Athenians regularly maintained a number of degraded and useless beings at the public expense; and when any calamity, such as plague, drought, or famine, befell the city, they sacrificed two of these outcast scapegoats. — James G. Frazer

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

The Golden Bough was popular with both scholars and laymen, and it dramatically influenced the work of Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung - Frazer's depiction of tales of myth and romance as echoes of ancient rituals chimed with Jung's description of archetypes that exist within the collective unconscious - as — George Pendle

This doctrine of transmigration or reincarnation of the soul is found among many tribes of savages — James G. Frazer

THE PRIMARY aim of this book is to explain the remarkable rule which regulated the succession to the priesthood of Diana at Aricia. — James George Frazer

Dance to the light that is your soul. — Jendayi Frazer

Where there's compassion, no heirarchy can exist. Where men are allowed to create themselves as equals, evil cannot thrive or survive. — Dean Frazer

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

Intolerance is evidence of fear, and fear is the consequence of feeling powerless. — Dean Frazer

This time she wasn't up the stump, as she spoke of it. Eventually she was able to give Frazer better news. But she made him wait for it. She wanted him to worry, or to give him practice in learning to worry about her and not about himself. She was not easy toward him. She knew it was unequal, that she loved him more than he could her or anyone. But neither was love his calling, as it was hers. And she was very severe and exalted about this. She too could have lived in desert wilderness for the sake of it, and have eaten locusts. — Saul Bellow

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

The Stetson passage is an allusion to Frazer theory in The Golden Bough that religion originated as agricultural engineering. Through a grotesque process of literalization, all of the dying gods and heroes in The Golden Bough, along with Christ and the Fisher King, are transferred from mythic to modern consciousness ( Frazer himself was an unabashed positivist) to be made explicable in scientific terms as fertilizer. — Jewel Spears Brooker

In primitive society, where uniformity of occupation is the rule, and the distribution of the community into various classes of workers has hardly begun, every man is more or less his own magician; he practices charms and incantations for his own good and the injury of his enemies. — James G. Frazer

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. — James G. Frazer

Never having children is a huge regret of mine. — Frazer Hines

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. — James G. Frazer

For the answer you seek,
Look up. — Megan Frazer Blakemore

The temple of the sylvan goddess, indeed, has vanished, and the King of the Wood no longer stands sentinel over the Golden Bough. — James G. Frazer

The advance of knowledge is an infinite progression towards a goal that ever recedes. — James G. Frazer

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. — James G. Frazer

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. — James G. Frazer

everything's just tickety-boo. — Andrea Frazer

circle back, you're nearly through.
The next one, then just one more clue.
Summer's coming, dark and drear,
Soon those tourists will appear.

In the word hoard you will find
Books with numbers on the spines.
A 2 a 9 a 2 again-
Not too easy for Athena's friend. — Megan Frazer Blakemore

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

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. — James G. Frazer

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. — James G. Frazer

Our Great King Ferdinand joined the warring masses,
And to honor him we pass him as we run to all our classes.
But if you stop and listen to the marble man,
He will tell you where to look, ye miners with a pan.
"My knight in dingy armor
Move as by your plan,
Then by crook or rook
Straight as you can. — Megan Frazer Blakemore

The natives of British Columbia live largely upon the fish which abound in their seas and rivers. If the fish do not come in due season, and the Indians are hungry, A Nootka wizard will make an image of a swimming fish and put it into the water in the direction from which the fish generally appear. This ceremony, accompanied by a prayer to the fish to come, will cause them to arrive at once. — James G. Frazer

Hence the strong attraction which magic and science alike have exercised on the human mind; hence the powerful stimulus that both have given to the pursuit of knowledge. They lure the weary enquirer, the footsore seeker, on through the wilderness of disappointment in the present by their endless promises of the future: they take him up to the top of an exceeding high mountain and show him, beyond the dark clouds and rolling mists at his feet, a vision of the celestial city, far off, it may be, but radiant with unearthly splendour, bathed in the light of dreams. — James G. Frazer

legend ascribed to the Tauric Diana is familiar to classical readers; — James George Frazer

From the earliest times man has been engaged in a search for general rules whereby to turn the order of natural phenomena to his own advantage, and in the long search he has scraped together a great hoard of such maxims, some of them golden and some of them mere dross. The true or golden rules constitute the body of applied science which we call the arts; the false are magic. — James G. Frazer

Joliffe knew their audience was with them when Christ declared at the money-changers, "You knaves! You thieves and rascals! Defaming the Lord God's honor as you do! Making his house into a den of thieves and taking what is not yours to take, like shepherds never shearing but butchering every sheep!" and among the lookers-on heads turned and some people pointed at Father Hewgo standing at his church door, glaring, his arms tightly folded aross his chest, well apart from it all but making sure his disapproval lowered over everything. Joliffe had not written the lines at him but might as well have because his parishioners surely saw a match; there was even scattered laughter that would do nothing to soften him toward the players. — Margaret Frazer

In point of fact magicians appear to have often developed into chiefs and kings. — James G. Frazer

The only way to go beyond your fears is to grow beyond them and that always means challenging, overcoming and learning from them. — Dean Frazer

Rebus nodded his understanding. The Murder Room was quiet when he reached it. Roy Frazer was reading a paper. "Finished with this?" Rebus asked, picking up another. Frazer nodded. "Chicken phal," Rebus explained, rubbing his stomach. "Hold all my calls and let everyone know the shunkie's off-limits." Frazer nodded and smiled. Saturday morning on the bog with the paper: everyone had done it at one time. — Ian Rankin

Ephraim found a stack of postcards tied together with a faded green ribbon. He shuffled through them and found they were from every World's Fair from 1915 in San Francisco to 1939 in New York. None of the postcards hed been written on or mailed. — Megan Frazer Blakemore

And I make no apology for linking my thinking with computer technology. — Maxwell Frazer

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

Don't you love those crazy Brits?
Jumpers for sweaters and spots for zits.
And when they want to change their suits,
It's in a box, not a booth.
Be a hero, make a call.
Steepest streets might make you fall. — Megan Frazer Blakemore

Normally zombies gave her comfort. They were slow. There were straightforward ways to kill them. If they ever showed up, she would know what to do. Too bad the rest of life wasn't like that. — Megan Frazer Blakemore

Frazer is much more savage than most of his savages, for they are not as far removed from the understanding of spiritual matter as a twentieth-century Englishman. His explanations of primitive practices are much cruder than the meaning of these practices themselves. — Ludwig Wittgenstein

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

The Raven's author_ _ _

Walked down the road, abbreviated so we're told. _ _

The bus came by and one departed,
That is to say, he got this. _ _ _

Come on now, it's time to play.
When water's cold it is that way. _ _ _

Put the pieces together, then roll you die.
Natural 20! Flying higt!
Find the boxes, nearly there:
Level up to 7, here is there. — Megan Frazer Blakemore

So in Scotland witches used to raise the wind by dipping a rag in water and beating it thrice on a stone, saying: "I knok this rag upone this stane To raise the wind in the divellis name, It sall not lye till I please againe. — James George Frazer

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. — James G. Frazer

The old notion that the savage is the freest of mankind is the reverse of the truth. He is a slave, not indeed to a visible master, but to the past, to the spirits of his dead forefathers, who haunt his steps from birth to death, and rule him with a rod of iron. — James G. Frazer

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

Grief is a lovely word and a lovely thing. It heals, as resentment cannot. Grief must be admitted and lived through, or it turns into resentment, and continues to bother you for the rest of your life, rearing its depressed little head at all the wrong moments, so that one Sunday tea time at the old lady's home you will unexpectedly begin to cry into your toasted teacake, and the nurses will say "Poor Mrs. Frazer, that's the end," and will move you into the senile ward, when the truth of the matter is quite different. It's not senility, but grief grown uncheckable with age. Myself, I cry now and eat now, so as not to cry later, when it is yet more dangerous. I shall make a very cheerful old lady. — Fay Weldon

The only time you truly make a mistake is when you commit a "mis-take," that is, you "miss-taking" the opportunity to learn a valuable lesson from your seemingly malfunctional experience. — Dean Frazer

The propensity to excessive simplification is indeed natural to the mind of man, since it is only by abstraction and generalisation, which necessarily imply the neglect of a multitude of particulars, that he can stretch his puny faculties so as to embrace a minute portion of the illimitable vastness of the universe. But if the propensity is natural and even inevitable, it is nevertheless fraught with peril, since it is apt to narrow and falsify our conception of any subject under investigation. To correct it partially - for to correct it wholly would require an infinite intelligence - we must endeavour to broaden our views by taking account of a wide range of facts and possibilities; and when we have done so to the utmost of our power, we must still remember that from the very nature of things our ideas fall immeasurably short of the reality. — James George Frazer

The abundance, the solidity, and the splendor of the results already achieved by science are well fitted to inspire us with a cheerful confidence in the soundness of its method. — James G. Frazer

Add Snow White and her seven dwarfs,
2 droids for Luke Skywalker, of course.
1 true ring to rule them all.
A decimal is a place to stall.
Snow White's gone, the dwarfs alone.
This system your next clue has shown.

Now you might ask, this little key, Just what does it mean for me?
Hold on tight and you will see,
Someday it will set clues free. — Megan Frazer Blakemore

For extending its sway, partly by force of arms, partly by the voluntary submission of weaker tribes, the community soon acquires wealth and slaves, both of which, by relieving some classes from the perpetual struggle for a bare subsistence, afford them an opportunity of devoting themselves to that disinterested pursuit of knowledge which is the noblest and most powerful instrument to ameliorate the lot of man. — James G. Frazer

Chosing to stay in the moment, is choosing to be free from fear. — Dean Frazer

Dwellers by the sea cannot fail to be impressed by the sight of its ceaseless ebb and flow, and are apt, on the principles of that rude philosophy of sympathy and resemblance ... to trace a subtle relation, a secret harmony , between its tides and the life of man ... The belief that most deaths happen at ebb tide is said to be held along the east coast of England from Northumberland to Kent. — James G. Frazer

In its enervating plains, far removed from the invigorating sea-breeze and the bracing cold of the mountain ranges, the keen eye, undaunted heart, and relentless arm of the successive hardy northern immigrants slowly but surely tend to change to the placid look, folded hands and brooding mind of the Eastern Sage, who, content to dream his dream of life, wearily turns from the conflict and dire struggle for existence, — R.W. Frazer

His gaze glossed over a stack of wooden crates and landed on a steamer trunk that was covered with stickers from all over the world. — Megan Frazer Blakemore

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

For there are strong grounds for thinking that, in the evolution of thought, magic has preceded religion . — James G. Frazer

For strength of character in the race as in the individual consists mainly in the power of sacrificing the present for the future, of disregarding the immediate temptations of ephemeral pleasure for more distant and lasting sources of satisfaction. The more the power is exercised the higher and stronger becomes the character; till the height of heroism is reached in men who renounce the pleasures of life and even life itself for the sake of winning for others, perhaps in distant ages, the blessings of freedom and truth. — James George Frazer

Some of the old laws of Israel are clearly savage taboos of a familiar type thinly disguised as commands of the Deity. — James G. Frazer

Mr. Douglas told us true.
He knows why the sky is blue.
Why the earth spins round and round,
And where the next clue can be found.
Ask him, maybe, will he tell you?
His radio, those ads will sell you.
Peppy song will make you wonder,
If the world is going under.
Bring him something from the doctor-
-Nothing spicy-while he proctors.
It may be those fizzy bubbles,
Let him help you with your troubles. — Megan Frazer Blakemore

For when a nation becomes civilized, if it does not drop human sacrifices altogether, it at least selects as victims only such wretches as would be put to death at any rate. Thus the killing of a god may sometimes come to be confounded with the execution of a criminal. — James G. Frazer