50 quotes
If mankind had always been logical and wise, history would not be a long chronicle of folly and crime.
The Golden Bough (1890)
The scapegoat upon whom the sins of the people are periodically laid, may also be a human being.
The Golden Bough (1890)
We seem to move on a thin crust which may at any moment be rent by the subterranean forces slumbering below.
The Golden Bough (1890)
The temple of the sylvan goddess, indeed, has vanished, and the King of the Wood no longer stands sentinel over the Golden Bough.
The Golden Bough (1890)
The consideration of human suffering is not one which enters into the calculations of primitive man.
The Golden Bough (1890)
Yet perhaps no sacrifice is wholly useless which proves there are men who prefer honour to life.
The Golden Bough (1890)
The world cannot live at the level of its great men.
The Golden Bough (1890)
The true or golden rules constitute the body of applied science which we call the arts; the false are magic.
The Golden Bough (1890)
They too, like so much that to the common eye seems solid, may melt into air, into thin air.
The Golden Bough (1890)
I am a plain practical man, not one of your theorists and splitters of hairs and choppers of logic.
The Golden Bough (1890)
From time immemorial the mistletoe has been the object of superstitious veneration in Europe.
The Golden Bough (1890)
The custom of burning a beneficent god is too foreign to later modes of thought to escape misinterpretation.
The Golden Bough (1890)
The advance of knowledge is an infinite progression towards a goal that ever recedes.
The Golden Bough (1890)
For the present we have journeyed far enough together, and it is time to part.
The Golden Bough (1890)
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 Golden Bough (1890)
For there are strong grounds for thinking that, in the evolution of thought, magic has preceded religion.
The Golden Bough (1890)
Indeed the influence of music on the development of religion is a subject which would repay a sympathetic study.
The Golden Bough (1890)
In point of fact magicians appear to have often developed into chiefs and kings.
The Golden Bough (1890)
The awe and dread with which the untutored savage contemplates his mother-in-law are amongst the most familiar facts of anthropology.
The Golden Bough (1890)
To a modern reader the connexion at first sight may not be obvious between the activity of the hangman and the productivity of the earth.
The Golden Bough (1890)