Quote

If we are more affected by the ruin of a palace than by the conflagration of a cottage, our humanity must have formed a very erroneous estimate of the miseries of human life.

Edward Gibbon

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Edward Gibbon
Age: 56 †
Born: 1737
Born: May 8
Died: 1794
Died: January 16
Classical Scholar
Historian
Politician
Writer
Gibbon
Human
Palaces
Humans
Ruin
Conflagration
Must
Formed
Erroneous
Life
Ruins
Cottage
Affected
Cottages
Misery
Miseries
Sorrow
Estimate
Humanity
Palace

More quotes by Edward Gibbon

Image
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
Image
But a wild democracy . . . too often disdains the essential principles of justice.
Edward Gibbon
Image
The monastic studies have tended, for the most part, to darken, rather than to dispel, the cloud of superstition.
Edward Gibbon
Image
[It] is the interest as well as duty of a sovereign to maintain the authority of the laws.
Edward Gibbon
Image
History should be to the political economist a wellspring of experience and wisdom.
Edward Gibbon
Image
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.
Edward Gibbon
Image
The end comes when we no longer talk with ourselves. It is the end of genuine thinking and the beginning of the final loneliness.
Edward Gibbon
Image
Rational confidence [is] the just result of knowledge and experience.
Edward Gibbon
Image
Vicissitudes of fortune, which spares neither man nor the proudest of his works, which buries empires and cities in a common grave.
Edward Gibbon
Image
Metellus Numidicus, the censor, acknowledged to the Roman people, in a public oration, that had kind nature allowed us to exist without the help of women, we should be delivered from a very troublesome companion and he could recommend matrimony only as the sacrifice of private pleasure to public duty.
Edward Gibbon
Image
[Arabs are] a people, whom it is dangerous to provoke, and fruitless to attack.
Edward Gibbon
Image
Women [in ancient Rome] were condemned to the perpetual tutelage of parents, husbands, or guardians a sex created to please and obey was never supposed to have attained the age of reason and experience. Such, at least, was the stern and haughty spirit of the ancient law . . .
Edward Gibbon
Image
[The] vain and transitory scenes of human greatness are unworthy of a serious thought.
Edward Gibbon
Image
While the Romans languished under the ignominious tyranny of eunuchs and bishops, the praises of Julian were repeated with transport in every part of the empire, except in the palace of Constantius.
Edward Gibbon
Image
A Locrian, who proposed any new law, stood forth in the assembly of the people with a cord round his neck, and if the law was rejected, the innovator was instantly strangled.
Edward Gibbon
Image
The love of study, a passion which derives fresh vigor from enjoyment, supplies each day, each hour, with a perpetual source of independent and rational pleasure.
Edward Gibbon
Image
Corruption, the most infallible symptom of constitutional liberty.
Edward Gibbon
Image
I sighed as a lover, I obeyed as a son.
Edward Gibbon
Image
Since the primitive times, the wealth of the popes was exposed to envy, their powers to opposition, and their persons to violence.
Edward Gibbon
Image
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