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

More quotes by Edward Gibbon

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The separation of the Arabs from the rest of mankind has accustomed them to confound the ideas of stranger and enemy.
Edward Gibbon
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To a philosophic eye, the vices of the clergy are far less dangerous than their virtues.
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But the works of man are impotent against the assaults of nature . . .
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The incapacity of a weak and distracted government may often assume the appearance and produce the effects of a treasonable correspondence with the public enemy. If Alaric himself had been introduced into the council of Ravenna, he would probably have advised the same measures which were actually pursued by the ministers of Honorius.
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A sentence of death and infamy was often founded on the slight and suspicious evidence of a child or a servant: the guilt [of the defendant] was presumed by the judges [due to the nature of the charge], and paederasty became the crime of those to whom no crime could be imputed.
Edward Gibbon
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I sighed as a lover, I obeyed as a son.
Edward Gibbon
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The two Antonines (for it is of them that we are now speaking) governed the Roman world forty-two years, with the same invariable spirit of wisdom and virtue. ... Their united reigns are possibly the only period of history in which the happiness of a great people was the sole object of government.
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On the approach of spring, I withdraw without reluctance from the noisy and extensive scene of crowds without company, and dissipation without pleasure.
Edward Gibbon
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[The] vain and transitory scenes of human greatness are unworthy of a serious thought.
Edward Gibbon
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The end comes when we no longer talk with ourselves. It is the end of genuine thinking and the beginning of the final loneliness.
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The value of money has been settled by general consent to express our wants and our property, as letters were invented to express our ideas and both these institutions, by giving a more active energy to the powers and passions of human nature, have contributed to multiply the objects they were designed to represent.
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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If this Punic war was carried on without any effusion of blood, it was owing much less to the moderation than to the weakness of the contending prelates.
Edward Gibbon
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[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
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Europe is secure from any future irruptions of Barbarians since, before they can conquer, they must cease to be barbarous.
Edward Gibbon
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The criminal penalties [for suicide] are the production of a later and darker age.
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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The love of spectacles was the taste, or rather passion, of the Syrians: the most skilful artists were procured form the adjacent cities a considerable share of the revenue was devoted to the public amusements and the magnificence of the games of the theatre and circus was considered as the happiness, and as the glory, of Antioch.
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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
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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