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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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Edward Gibbon
Age: 56 †
Born: 1737
Born: May 8
Died: 1794
Died: January 16
Classical Scholar
Historian
Politician
Writer
Gibbon
According
English
Travel
Perhaps
Completes
Education
Custom
Law
Customs
Reason
Gentleman
Foreign

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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.
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As for this young Ali, one cannot but like him. A noble-minded creature, as he shows himself, now and always afterwards full of affection, of fiery daring. Something chivalrous in him brave as a lion yet with a grace, a truth and affection worthy of Christian knighthood.
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bizarreness masqueraded as creativity.
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The frequent repetition of miracles serves to provoke, where it does not subdue, the reason of mankind.
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Our sympathy is cold to the relation of distant misery.
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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
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History, which undertakes to record the transactions of the past, for the instruction of future ages, would ill deserve that honourable office if she condescended to plead the cause of tyrants, or to justify the maxims of persecution.
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A taste for books, which is still the pleasure and glory of my life.
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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.
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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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The union of the Roman empire was dissolved its genius was humbled in the dust and armies of unknown barbarians, issuing from the frozen regions of the North, had established their victorious reign over the fairest provinces of Europe and Africa.
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But a wild democracy . . . too often disdains the essential principles of justice.
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The fortune of nations has often depended on accidents . . .
Edward Gibbon
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Every event, or appearance, or accident, which seems to deviate from the ordinary course of nature has been rashly ascribed to the immediate action of the Deity.
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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The mathematics are distinguished by a particular privilege, that is, in the course of ages, they may always advance and can never recede.
Edward Gibbon
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Their poverty secured their freedom, since our desires and our possessions are the strongest fetters of despotism.
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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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.
Edward Gibbon
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My early and invincible love of reading I would not exchange for all the riches of India.
Edward Gibbon