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Our sympathy is cold to the relation of distant misery.

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
Distant
Sympathy
Misery
Relation
Cold
Suffering

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I sighed as a lover, I obeyed as a son.
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[It] is the interest as well as duty of a sovereign to maintain the authority of the laws.
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The principles of a free constitution are irrecoverably lost, when the legislative power is nominated by the executive.
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In everyage and country, the wiser, or at least the stronger, ofthetwosexes, hasusurped thepowers ofthe state, and confined the other to the cares and pleasures of domestic life.
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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.
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[The] noblest of [Arabs] united the love of arms with the profession of merchandise.
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The Gauls derided the hairy and gigantic savages of the North their rustic manners, dissonant joy, voracious appetite, and their horrid appearance, equally disgusting to the sight and to the smell.
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It was [Totila's] constant theme, that national vice and ruin are inseparably connected that victory is the fruit of moral as well as military virtue and that the prince, and even the people, are responsible for the crimes which they neglect to punish.
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The possession and the enjoyment of property are the pledges which bind a civilised people to an improved country.
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[Courage] arises in a great measure from the consciousness of strength . . .
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All that is human must retrograde if it does not advance.
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Man has much more to fear from the passions of his fellow-creatures, than from the convulsions of the elements.
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The simple circumstantial narrative (did such a narrative exist) of the ruin of a single town, of the misfortunes of a single family, might exhibit an interesting and instructive picture of human manners but the tedious repetition of vague and declamatory complaints would fatigue the attention of the most patient reader.
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Hope, the best comfort of our imperfect condition.
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It was here that I suspended my religious inquiries (aged 17).
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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.
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But the power of instruction is seldom of much efficacy, except in those happy dispositions where it is almost superfluous.
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If a man were called to fix the period in the history of the world during which the condition of the human race was most happy and prosperous, he would, without hesitation, name that which elapsed from the death of Domitian to the accession of Commodus.
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[We should] suspend our belief of every tale that deviates from the laws of nature and the character of man.
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