Quotes from Edward Gibbon

[Courage] arises in a great measure from the consciousness of strength . . .

We improve ourselves by victories over ourselves. There must be contest, and we must win.

The winds and the waves are always on the side of the ablest navigators.

My English text is chaste, and all licentious passages are left in the decent obscurity of a learned language.

In a distant age and climate, the tragic scene of the death of Hosein will awaken the sympathy of the coldest reader.

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.

The first of earthly blessings, independence.

Our work is the presentation of our capabilities.

I am indeed rich, since my income is superior to my expenses, and my expense is equal to my wishes.

I understand by this passion the union of desire, friendship, and tenderness, which is inflamed by a single female, which prefers her to the rest of her sex, and which seeks her possession as the supreme or the sole happiness of our being.

We improve ourselves by victories over ourself. There must be contests, and you must win.

A martial nobility and stubborn commons, possessed of arms, tenacious of property, and collected into constitutional assemblies form the only balance capable of preserving a free constitution against the enterprise of an aspiring prince.

The winds and the waves are always on the side of the ablest navigators.

Vicissitudes of fortune, which spares neither man nor the proudest of his works, which buries empires and cities in a common grave.

The mathematics are distinguished by a particular privilege, that is, in the course of ages, they may always advance and can never recede.

All that is human must retrograde if it do not advance.

But the power of instruction is seldom of much efficacy, except in those happy dispositions where it is almost superfluous.

The principles of a free constitution are irrevocably lost, when the legislative power is nominated by the executive.

Their poverty secured their freedom, since our desires and our possessions are the strongest fetters of despotism.

It was at Rome, on the fifteenth of October 1764, as I sat musing amidst the ruins of the Capitol, while the barefoot friars were singing vespers in the Temple of Jupiter, that the idea of writing the decline and fall of the city first started to my mind.

The courage of a soldier is found to be the cheapest and most common quality of human nature.

It was here [at the age of seventeen] that I suspended my religious inquiries.

The successors of Charles the Fifth may disdain their brethren of England; but the romance of Tom Jones, that exquisite picture of human manners, will outlive the palace of the Escurial and the imperial eagle of the house of Austria.

I saw and loved.