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Rational confidence [is] the just result of knowledge and experience.

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
Confidence
Results
Knowledge
Experience
Rational
Result

More quotes by Edward Gibbon

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All that is human must retrograde if it does not advance.
Edward Gibbon
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[Arabs are] a people, whom it is dangerous to provoke, and fruitless to attack.
Edward Gibbon
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But a wild democracy . . . too often disdains the essential principles of justice.
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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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.
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The Romans, who so coolly and so concisely mention the acts of justice which were exercised by the legions, reserve their compassion and their eloquence for their own sufferings, when the provinces were invaded and desolated by the arms of the successful Barbarians.
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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Amiable weaknesses of human nature.
Edward Gibbon
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[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
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Active valour may often be the present of nature but such patient diligence can be the fruit only of habit and discipline.
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] operation of the wisest laws is imperfect and precarious. They seldom inspire virtue, they cannot always restrain vice.
Edward Gibbon
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Extreme distress, which unites the virtue of a free people, imbitters the factions of a declining monarchy.
Edward Gibbon
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According to the law of custom, and perhaps of reason, foreign travel completes the education of an English gentleman.
Edward Gibbon
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Constantinople was the principal seat and fortress of Arianism and, in a long interval of forty years, the faith of the princes and prelates who reigned in the capital of the East was rejected in the purer schools of Rome and Alexandria.
Edward Gibbon
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[The] penalty of death was abolished in the Roman empire, a law of mercy most delightful to the humane theorist, but of which the practice, in a large and vicious community, is seldom consistent with the public safety.
Edward Gibbon
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I darted a contemptuous look at the stately models of superstition.
Edward Gibbon
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The most distinguished merit of those two officers was their respective prowess, of the one in the combats of Bacchus, of the other in those of Venus.
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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But the wisdom and authority of the legislator are seldom victorious in a contest with the vigilant dexterity of private interest.
Edward Gibbon