39 Quotes by James G. Frazer

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.