Edward Gibbon Quotes
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Crowds without company, and dissipation without pleasure.
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Revenge is profitable, gratitude is expensive.
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The winds and waves are always on the side of the ablest navigators.
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Vicissitudes of fortune, which spares neither man nor the proudest of his works, which buries empires and cities in a common grave.
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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.
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I sighed as a lover, I obeyed as a son.
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It was here at the age of seventeen that I suspended my religious inquiries.
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I was never less alone than when by myself.
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Decent easy men, who supinely enjoyed the gifts of the founder.
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Amiable weaknesses of human nature.
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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.
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Wit and valor are qualities that are more easily ascertained than virtue, or the love of wisdom.
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The captain of the Hampshire grenadiers...has not been useless to the historian of the Roman Empire.
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In a distant age and climate the tragic scene of the death of Hussyn will awaken the sympathy of the coldest reader.
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In every deed of mischief he had a heart to resolve, a head to contrive, and a hand to execute.
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Our sympathy is cold to the relation of distant misery.
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On the approach of spring I withdraw without reluctance from the noisy and extensive scene of crowds without company, and dissipation without pleasure.
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I saw and loved.
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The reign of Antoninus is marked by the rare advantage of furnishing very few materials for history, which is indeed little more than the register of the crimes, follies, and misfortunes of mankind.
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It has been calculated by the ablest politicians that no State, without being soon exhausted, can maintain above the hundredth part of its members in arms and idleness.
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Antoninus diffused order and tranquility over the greatest part of the earth. His reign is marked by the rare advantage of furnishing very few materials for history; which is, indeed, little more than the register of the crimes, follies, and misfortunes of mankind.
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A long period of distress and anarchy, in which empire, and arts, and riches, had migrated from the banks of the Tiber, was incapable of restoring or adorning the city; and, as all that is human must retrograde if it do not advance, every successive age must have hastened the ruin of the works of antiquity.