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Every person has two educations, one which he receives from others, and one, more important, which he gives to himself.

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
Two
Persons
Person
Giving
Important
Educations
Every
Receives
Gives
Others

More quotes by Edward Gibbon

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Instead of a perpetual and perfect measure of the divine will, the fragments of the Koran were produced at the discretion of Mahomet each revelation is suited to the emergencies of his policy or passion and all contradiction is removed by the saving maxim that any text of Scripture is abrogated or modified by any subsequent passage.
Edward Gibbon
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The desire of perfection became the ruling passion of their soul and it is well known, that while reason embraces a cold mediocrity, our passions hurry us, with rapid violence, over the space which lies between the most opposite extremes.
Edward Gibbon
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Revenge is profitable, gratitude is expensive.
Edward Gibbon
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The primitive Christians perpetually trod on mystic ground, and their minds were exercised by the habits of believing the most extraordinary events
Edward Gibbon
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Man has much more to fear from the passions of his fellow-creatures, than from the convulsions of the elements.
Edward Gibbon
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My early and invincible love of reading I would not exchange for all the riches of India.
Edward Gibbon
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Truth, naked, unblushing truth, the first virtue of all serious history, must be the sole recommendation of this personal narrative.
Edward Gibbon
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The most worthless of mankind are not afraid to condemn in others the same disorders which they allow in themselves and can readily discover some nice difference in age, character, or station, to justify the partial distinction.
Edward Gibbon
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In a distant age and climate, the tragic scene of the death of Hosein will awaken the sympathy of the coldest reader.
Edward Gibbon
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Religion is a mere question of geography.
Edward Gibbon
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[Peace] cannot be honorable or secure, if the sovereign betrays a pusillanimous aversion to war.
Edward Gibbon
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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
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[The] emperor of the West, the feeble and dissolute Valentinian, [had] reached his thirty-fifth year without attaining the age of reason or courage.
Edward Gibbon
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But a wild democracy . . . too often disdains the essential principles of justice.
Edward Gibbon
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Our sympathy is cold to the relation of distant misery.
Edward Gibbon
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In the field of controversy I always pity the moderate party, who stand on the open middle ground exposed to the fire of both sides.
Edward Gibbon
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The dark cloud, which had been cleared by the Phoenician discoveries, and finally dispelled by the arms of Caesar, again settled on the shores of the Atlantic, and a Roman province [Britain] was again lost among the fabulous Islands of the Ocean.
Edward Gibbon
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It is seldom that minds long exercised in business have formed any habits of conversing with themselves, and in the loss of power they principally regret the want of occupation.
Edward Gibbon
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In the end, they wanted security more than they wanted freedom.
Edward Gibbon
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In this primitive and abject state [of hunters and gatherers], which ill deserves the name of society, the human brute, without arts or laws, almost without sense or language, is poorly distinguished from the rest of the animal creation.
Edward Gibbon