James Frazer quotes

James Frazer was a Scottish social anthropologist renowned for his pioneering work in the study of mythology and comparative religion. His most famous book, "The Golden Bough," had a profound influence on anthropology, literature, and psychology. He explored the connections between magic, religion, and science, shaping modern understanding of human belief systems. Here are 58 of his quotes:

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

James Frazer

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

James Frazer

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

James 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 Frazer

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

James Frazer

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

James Frazer

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

James 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 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 Frazer

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

James Frazer

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

James 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 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 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 Frazer

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

James Frazer

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

James 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 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 Frazer

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

James 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 Frazer

To a modern reader the connexion at first site may not be obvious between the activity of the hangman and the productivity of the earth.

James Frazer

In the ages to come man may be able to predict, perhaps even to control, the wayward courses of the winds and the clouds, but hardly will his puny hands have strength to speed afresh our slackening planet in its orbit or rekindle the dying fire of the sun. Yet the philosopher who trembles at the idea of such distant catastrophes may console himself by reflecting that these gloomy apprehensions, like the earth and the sun themselves, are only parts of that unsubstantial world which thought has conjured up out of the void, and that the phantoms which the subtle enchantress has evoked to-day she may ban to-morrow. They too, like so much that to the common eye seems solid, may melt into air, into thin air.

James Frazer