James G. Frazer Quotes

By religion, then, I understand a propitiation or conciliation of powers superior to man which are believed to direct and control the course of nature and of human life.

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

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

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.

The advance of knowledge is an infinite progression towards a goal that ever recedes.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

The world cannot live at the level of its great men.

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

This doctrine of transmigration or reincarnation of the soul is found among many tribes of savages

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

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

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.

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

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

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