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A heart to resolve, a head to contrive, and a hand to execute.
Edward Gibbon
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Edward Gibbon
Age: 56 †
Born: 1737
Born: May 8
Died: 1794
Died: January 16
Classical Scholar
Historian
Politician
Writer
Gibbon
Hand
Action
Hands
Heart
Contrive
Execute
Mischief
Resolve
Head
More quotes by Edward Gibbon
But the works of man are impotent against the assaults of nature . . .
Edward Gibbon
[Arabs are] a people, whom it is dangerous to provoke, and fruitless to attack.
Edward Gibbon
Hope, the best comfort of our imperfect condition, was not denied to the Roman slave and if he had any opportunity of rendering himself either useful or agreeable, he might very naturally expect that the diligence and fidelity of a few years would be rewarded with the inestimable gift of freedom.
Edward Gibbon
[The] events by which the fate of nations is not materially changed, leave a faint impression on the page of history, and the patience of the reader would be exhausted by the repetition of the same hostilities [between Rome and Persia], undertaken without cause, prosecuted without glory, and terminated without effect.
Edward Gibbon
In the end, they wanted security more than they wanted freedom.
Edward Gibbon
So natural to man is the practice of violence that our indulgence allows the slightest provocation, the most disputable right, as a sufficient ground of national hostility.
Edward Gibbon
Yet the experience of four thousand years should enlarge our hopes, and diminish our apprehensions: we cannot determine to what height the human species may aspire in their advances towards perfection but it may safely be presumed, that no people, unless the face of nature is changed, will relapse into their original barbarism.
Edward Gibbon
[The] penalty of death was abolished in the Roman empire, a law of mercy most delightful to the humane theorist, but of which the practice, in a large and vicious community, is seldom consistent with the public safety.
Edward Gibbon
The subject, however various and important, has already been so frequently, so ably, and so successfully discussed, that it is now grown familiar to the reader, and difficult to the writer.
Edward Gibbon
History should be to the political economist a wellspring of experience and wisdom.
Edward Gibbon
The criminal penalties [for suicide] are the production of a later and darker age.
Edward Gibbon
But a wild democracy . . . too often disdains the essential principles of justice.
Edward Gibbon
If all the barbarian conquerors had been annihilated in the same hour, their total destruction would not have restored the empire of the West: and if Rome still survived, she survived the loss of freedom, of virtue, and of honour.
Edward Gibbon
To a philosophic eye, the vices of the clergy are far less dangerous than their virtues.
Edward Gibbon
I sighed as a lover, I obeyed as a son.
Edward Gibbon
To the love of pleasure we may therefore ascribe most of the agreeable, to the love of action we may attribute most of the useful and respectable, qualifications. The character in which both the one and the other should be united and harmonised would seem to constitute the most perfect idea of human nature.
Edward Gibbon
Their poverty secured their freedom, since our desires and our possessions are the strongest fetters of despotism.
Edward Gibbon
My early and invincible love of reading I would not exchange for all the riches of India.
Edward Gibbon
Such events may be disbelieved or disregarded but the charity of a bishop, Acacius of Amida, whose name might have dignified the saintly calendar, shall not be lost in oblivion.
Edward Gibbon
If we are more affected by the ruin of a palace than by the conflagration of a cottage, our humanity must have formed a very erroneous estimate of the miseries of human life.
Edward Gibbon
