James 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

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

(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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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 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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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