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The frequent repetition of miracles serves to provoke, where it does not subdue, the reason of mankind.

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
Repetition
Miracles
Miracle
Mankind
Subdue
History
Provoke
Doe
Frequent
Reason
Provoking
Serves

More quotes by Edward Gibbon

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The progress of manufactures and commerce insensibly collects a large multitude within the walls of a city: but these citizens are no longer soldiers and the arts which adorn and improve the state of civil society, corrupt the habits of the military life.
Edward Gibbon
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It was with the utmost difficulty that ancient Rome could support the institution of six vestals but the primitive church was filled with a great number of persons of either sex who had devoted themselves to the profession of perpetual chastity.
Edward Gibbon
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[The] discretion of the judge is the first engine of tyranny . . .
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Our sympathy is cold to the relation of distant misery.
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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
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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.
Edward Gibbon
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Vicissitudes of fortune, which spares neither man nor the proudest of his works, which buries empires and cities in a common grave.
Edward Gibbon
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[Every] hour of delay abates the fame and force of the invader, and multiplies the resources of defensive war.
Edward Gibbon
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[We should] suspend our belief of every tale that deviates from the laws of nature and the character of man.
Edward Gibbon
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It was Rome, on the fifteenth of October, 1764, as I sat musing amidst the ruins of the Capitol, while the barefooted friars were singing vespers in the Temple of Jupiter, that the idea of writing the decline and fall of the city first started to my mind.
Edward Gibbon
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We may therefore acquiesce in the pleasing conclusion, that every age of the world has increased, and still increases, the real wealth, the happiness, the knowledge, and perhaps the virtue, of the human race.
Edward Gibbon
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In the end, they wanted security more than they wanted freedom.
Edward Gibbon
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It has always been my practice to cast a long paragraph in a single mould, to try it by my ear, to deposit it in my memory, but to suspend the action of the pen till I had given the last polish to my work.
Edward Gibbon
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I darted a contemptuous look at the stately models of superstition.
Edward Gibbon
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But in almost every province of the Roman world, an army of fanatics, without authority and without discipline, invaded the peaceful inhabitants and the ruin of the fairest structures of antiquity still displays the ravages of those barbarians who alone had time and inclination to execute such laborious destruction.
Edward Gibbon
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Ignorant of the arts of luxury, the primitive Romans had improved the science of government and war.
Edward Gibbon
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A philosopher may deplore the eternal discords of the human race, but he will confess, that the desire of spoil is a more rational provocation than the vanity of conquest.
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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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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Language is the leading principle which unites or separates the tribes of mankind.
Edward Gibbon