James George Frazer citations (52 citations, Page 2)

James George Frazer: 52 citations0 J'aime

James George Frazer Citations

“Frazer est beaucoup plus « sauvage » que la plupart de ses sauvages, car ceux-ci ne seront pas aussi considérablement éloignés de la compréhension d’une affaire spirituelle qu’un Anglais du vingtième siècle.”

James George Frazer

“Je ne suis pas assez naïf pour prétendre que mes conclusions sur ces difficiles questions soient définitives. J'ai souvent changé mes opinions et je les changerai aussi souvent que les faits l'exigeront car, tel un caméléon, le chercheur sincère devrait changer ses couleurs pour s'adapter aux changements de couleurs du sol qu'il foule.”

James George Frazer

Extrait de la préface au premier volume de Totemism and exogamy (1910).

James George Frazer: Citations en anglais

“If in the present work I have dwelt at some length on the worship of trees, it is not, I trust, because I exaggerate its importance in the history of religion, still less because I would deduce from it a whole system of mythology; it is simply because I could not ignore the subject in attempting to explain the significance of a priest who bore the title of King Of the Wood, and one of whose titles to office was the plucking of a bough — the Golden Bough”

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James Frazer livre The Golden Bough

from a tree in the sacred grove.
Preface, 1 Brick Court Temple, London, June 1922.
The Golden Bough (1890)

“The notion that we can transfer our guilt and sufferings to some other being who will bear them for us is familiar to the savage mind. It arises from a very obvious confusion between the physical and the mental, between the material and the immaterial.”

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James Frazer livre The Golden Bough

Source: The Golden Bough (1890), Chapter 55, The Transference of Evil.

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

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James Frazer livre The Golden Bough

Source: The Golden Bough (1890), Chapter 57, Public Scapegoats.

“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.”

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James Frazer livre The Golden Bough

Source: The Golden Bough (1890), Chapter 64, The Burning of Human Beings in the Fires (spelling as per text).

“Thus it comes about that the endeavour of primitive people to make a clean sweep of all their troubles generally takes the form of a grand hunting out and expulsion of devils and ghosts. They think that if they can only shake off these their accursed tormentors, they will make a fresh start in life, happy and innocent; the tales of Eden and the old poetic golden age will come true again.”

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James Frazer livre The Golden Bough

Source: The Golden Bough (1890), Chapter 56, The Public Expulsion of Evils.

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

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James Frazer livre The Golden Bough

Source: The Golden Bough (1890), Chapter 37, Oriental Religions in the West.

“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.”

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James Frazer livre The Golden Bough

Source: The Golden Bough (1890), Chapter 5, The Magical Control of the Weather.

“If their king is their god, he is or should be also their preserver; and if he will not preserve them, he must make room for another who will.”

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James Frazer livre The Golden Bough

Source: The Golden Bough (1890), Chapter 17, The Burden of Royalty

“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.”

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James Frazer livre The Golden Bough

Source: The Golden Bough (1890), Chapter 4, Magic and Religion.

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

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James Frazer livre The Golden Bough

Source: The Golden Bough (1890), Chapter 24, The Killing of the Divine King.

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

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James Frazer livre The Golden Bough

Source: The Golden Bough (1890), Chapter 64, The Burning of Human Beings in the Fires.

“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.”

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James Frazer livre The Golden Bough

Source: The Golden Bough (1890), Chapter 24, The Killing of the Divine King.

“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.”

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James Frazer livre The Golden Bough

Source: The Golden Bough (1890), Chapter 7, Incarnate Human Gods.

“From time immemorial the mistletoe has been the object of superstitious veneration in Europe.”

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James Frazer livre The Golden Bough

Source: The Golden Bough (1890), Chapter 65, Balder and the Mistletoe.

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

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James Frazer livre The Golden Bough

Source: The Golden Bough (1890), Chapter 69, Farewell to Nemi.

“For ages the army of spirits, once so near, has been receding farther and farther from us, banished by the magic wand of science from hearth and home, from ruined cell and ivied tower, from haunted glade and lonely mere, from the riven murky cloud that belches forth lightning, and from those fairer clouds that pillow the silvery moon or fret with flakes of burning red the golden eve.”

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James Frazer livre The Golden Bough

Source: The Golden Bough (1890), Chapter 56, The Public Expulsion of Evils.

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

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James Frazer livre The Golden Bough

Source: The Golden Bough (1890), Chapter 3, Sympathetic Magic.

“Ancient magic was the very foundation of religion.”

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James Frazer livre The Golden Bough

Source: The Golden Bough (1890), Chapter 4, Magic and Religion

“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.”

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James Frazer livre The Golden Bough

Source: The Golden Bough (1890), Chapter 29, The Myth of Adonis.

“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.”

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James Frazer livre The Golden Bough

Source: The Golden Bough (1890), Chapter 69, Farewell to Nemi

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