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The desire of perfection became the ruling passion of their soul and it is well known, that while reason embraces a cold mediocrity, our passions hurry us, with rapid violence, over the space which lies between the most opposite extremes.

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
Space
Embrace
Rapids
Lying
Perfection
Hurry
Desire
Became
Ruling
Soul
Lies
Mediocrity
Reason
Cold
Passions
Wells
Violence
Extremes
Well
Passion
Opposite
Embraces
Known
Opposites
Rapid

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[Arabs are] a people, whom it is dangerous to provoke, and fruitless to attack.
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It was here that I suspended my religious inquiries (aged 17).
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The progress of despotism tends to disappoint its own purpose.
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The subject, however various and important, has already been so frequently, so ably, and so successfully discussed, that it is now grown familiar to the reader, and difficult to the writer.
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Extreme distress, which unites the virtue of a free people, imbitters the factions of a declining monarchy.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Yet the civilians have always respected the natural right of a citizen to dispose of his life . . .
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Unprovided with original learning, unformed in the habits of thinking, unskilled in the arts of composition, I resolved to write a book.
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Their poverty secured their freedom, since our desires and our possessions are the strongest fetters of despotism.
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War, in its fairest form, implies a perpetual violation of humanity and justice.
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I sighed as a lover, I obeyed as a son.
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To a philosophic eye, the vices of the clergy are far less dangerous than their virtues.
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The ruin of Paganism, in the age of Theodosius, is perhaps the only example of the total extirpation of any ancient and popular superstition and may therefore deserve to be considered, as a singular event in the history of the human mind.
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Revenge is profitable, gratitude is expensive.
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Such events may be disbelieved or disregarded but the charity of a bishop, Acacius of Amida, whose name might have dignified the saintly calendar, shall not be lost in oblivion.
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