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It was here that I suspended my religious inquiries (aged 17).
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
Inquiries
Suspended
Aged
Inquiry
Religious
More quotes by Edward Gibbon
It was among the ruins of the capitol that I first conceived the idea of a work which has amused and exercised nearly twenty years of my life.
Edward Gibbon
The single combats of the heroes of history or fable amuse our fancy and engage our affections: the skillful evolutions of war may inform the mind, and improve a necessary, though pernicious, science. But in the uniform and odious pictures of a general assault, all is blood, and horror, and confusion . . .
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
Corruption, the most infallible symptom of constitutional liberty.
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
[Peace] cannot be honorable or secure, if the sovereign betrays a pusillanimous aversion to war.
Edward Gibbon
Since the primitive times, the wealth of the popes was exposed to envy, their powers to opposition, and their persons to violence.
Edward Gibbon
[But] the man who dares not expose his life in the defence of his children and his property, has lost in society the first and most active energies of nature.
Edward Gibbon
Where the subject lies so far beyond our reach, the difference between the highest and the lowest of human understandings may indeed be calculated as infinitely small yet the degree of weakness may perhaps be measured by the degree of obstinacy and dogmatic confidence.
Edward Gibbon
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.
Edward Gibbon
[The monks'] credulity debased and vitiated the faculties of the mind: they corrupted the evidence of history and superstition gradually extinguished the hostile light of philosophy and science.
Edward Gibbon
This variety of objects will suspend, for some time, the course of the narrative but the interruption will be censured only by those readers who are insensible to the importance of laws and manners, while they peruse, with eager curiosity, the transient intrigues of a court, or the accidental event of a battle.
Edward Gibbon
bizarreness masqueraded as creativity.
Edward Gibbon
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
But the power of instruction is seldom of much efficacy, except in those happy dispositions where it is almost superfluous.
Edward Gibbon
But a wild democracy . . . too often disdains the essential principles of justice.
Edward Gibbon
Fanaticism obliterates the feelings of humanity.
Edward Gibbon
Europe is secure from any future irruptions of Barbarians since, before they can conquer, they must cease to be barbarous.
Edward Gibbon
[Arabs are] a people, whom it is dangerous to provoke, and fruitless to attack.
Edward Gibbon
To the University of Oxford I acknowledge no obligation and she will as cheerfully renounce me for a son, as I am willing to disclaim her for a mother. I spent fourteen months at Magdalen College: they proved the fourteen months the most idle and unprofitable of my whole life.
Edward Gibbon