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Home  »  Dictionary of Quotations  »  Gibbon

James Wood, comp. Dictionary of Quotations. 1899.

Gibbon

A heart to resolve, a head to contrive, and a hand to execute.

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

Conversation enriches the understanding; but solitude is the school of genius.

Fanaticism obliterates the feelings of humanity.

History is indeed little more than the register of the crimes, follies, and misfortunes of mankind.

The pathetic almost always consists in the detail of little circumstances.

The unfortunate are loud and loquacious in their complaints, but real happiness is content with its own silent enjoyment.

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.

Whenever the offence inspires less horror than the punishment, the rigour of penal law is obliged to give way to the common feelings of mankind.