Quotes by James G. Frazer

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.

Men

Philosophy

Sight

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.

Ideas

Past

Recognition

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.

Criminals

Doe

Sacrifice

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.

Art

Men

Order

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.

Dream

Powerful

Strong

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

Hair

Logic

Men

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.

Catholic

Hands

Magic

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.

Autumn

Spring

Summer

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.

Class

Men

Practice

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

Development

Influence

Study

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Accepting

Afterlife

Art

Autumn

Catholic

Cities

Class

Creatures

Criminals

Development

Distance

Doctrine

Doe

Dream

Facts

Fit

Hair

Hands

Ideas

Influence

Iron

Logic

Magic

May

Men

Numbers

Order

Past

People

Philosophy

Powerful

Practice

Prayer

Predicaments

Principles

Race

Recognition

Religious

Sacrifice

Savages

Sea

Sight

Sin

Soul

Spring

Strong

Study

Summer

Swimming

Two

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Quotes by James G. Frazer

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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