"O blessed letters that combine in one All ages past, and make one live with all, By you we do confer with who are gone, And the dead living unto counsel call: By you th'unborn shall have communion Of what we feel, and what doth us befall."

"The stars that have most glory have no rest."

"Devotion, mother of obedience."

"As that the walls worn thin, permit the mind To look out thorough, and his frailty find. 1"

"He hath nothing done that doth not all."

"The bounds once overgone that hold men in, They never stay; but on from bad to worse. Wrongs do not leave off there where they begin, But still beget new mischiefs in their course."

"Who reproves the lame must go upright."

"The thing possessed is not the thing it seems."

"Might, That makes a title where there is no right."

"When better choices are not to be had, We needs must take the seeming best of bad."

"Minions too great argue a King too weak."

"Shame leaves us by degrees."

"Jewels, orators of Love."

"Sweet, silent rhetoric of persuading eyes, Dumb eloquence, whose power doth move the blood More than the words or wisdom of the wise."

"But her will must be obeyed,"

"Care-charmer Sleep, son of the sable Night, Brother to Death, in silent darkness born."

"Care-Charmer Sleep, son of the sable Night, Brother to Death, in silent darkness born, Relieve my languish, and restore the light; With dark forgetting of my care return. And let the day be time enough to mourn The shipwreck of my ill adventured youth"

"And sport, sweet maid, in season of these years, And learn to gather flowers before they wither"

"For women grieve to think they must be old."

"Thou may’st repent that thou hast scorn’d my tears, When Winter snows upon thy sable hairs."

"I that have loved thee thus before thou fadest, My faith shall wax, when thou art in thy waning. The world shall find this miracle in me, That fire can burn when all the matter's spent."

"Men do not weigh the stalk for what it was, When once they find her flow’r, her glory, pass."

"The fairest flower that ever saw the light."

"Sacred on earth; designed a saint above!"

"Love is a sickness full of woes, All remedies refusing; A plant that with most cutting grows, Most barren with best using. Why so? More we enjoy it, more it dies; If not enjoy’d, it sighing cries— Heigh ho!Love is a torment of the mind, A tempest everlasting; And Jove hath made it of a kind Not well, nor full nor fasting. Why so? More we enjoy it, &c."

"To spend the time luxuriously Becomes not men of worth."

"Ah! 'tis the silent rhetoric of a look, That works the league betwixt the states of hearts."

"Man is a creature of a wilful head, And hardly driven is, but eas'ly led."

"Pity is sworn servant unto love; And thus be sure, wherever it begin To make the way, it lets the master in."

"The absent danger greater still appears; Less fears he who is near the thing he fears."

"Princes in this case Do hate the traitor, though they love the treason."

"For 'tis some ease our sorrows to reveal, If they to whom we shall impart our woes, Seem but to feel a part of what we feel, And meet us with a sigh, but at the close."

"Folly in youth is sin, in age 'tis madness."

"But years hath done this wrong, To make me write too much, and live too long."

"I have ten thousand apologies to make, for not having long ago returned you my best thanks for the very agreeable present you made me of the three last volumes of your History. I cannot express to you the pleasure it gives me to find, that by the universal assent of every man of taste and learning, whom I either know or correspond with, it sets you at the very head of the whole literary tribe at present existing in Europe."

"Though what Gibbon calls ‘the curiosity of the public’ may have exhausted itself long since, the candid judgment of many generations and of almost every class of readers has confirmed the opinion formed at once by Gibbon's own age. His great work remains an enduring monument of research, an imperishable literary possession and one of the highest encouragements to intellectual endeavour that can be found in the history of letters."

"The penetration, solidity, and taste, that made you the first of historians, dear Sir, prevent my being surprised at your being the best writer of controversial pamphlets too. I have read you with more precipitation than such a work deserved, but I could not disobey you and detain it. Yet even in that hurry I could discern, besides a thousand beauties and strokes of wit, the inimitable eighty-third page, and the conscious dignity that you maintain throughout over your monkish antagonists. When you are so superior in argument, it would look like insensibility to the power of your reasoning, to select transient passages for commendation; and yet I must mention one that pleased me particularly, from the delicacy of the severity, and from its novelty too; it is, ‘Bold is not the word.’ This is the feathered arrow of Cupid, that is more formidable than the club of Hercules."

"Gibbon was not interested in religious doctrine, though he amused himself with its speculative refinements. But religion and Churches, he would admit, are a social and psychological necessity, and the particular forms which they take are important, for they can influence the progress or decline of civilization. Therefore the historical question he asked was, did the ideas of Christianity and the organization of the Church, as adapted to the Roman Empire, generate or stifle public spirit, freedom, and the advancement of knowledge and a plural society. His answer was that they stifled it. If Christianity had first been established in independent city-states like those of Greece, perhaps it would have assumed a different and more useful form – as it eventually did in the communes of Italy and, more successfully, in the Protestant cities of Switzerland. But the very fact of its establishment by imperial power, as an ideological support to that power, made it subservient to a centralized, monopolist system whose organization and absolutism, in its own formative period, it imitated and sustained."

"Gibbon's historical philosophy was...animated by...what we now call "civic humanism": that is, the conviction that the progress of society depends on a certain moral force: the "spirit" which, to Montesquieu, must animate the "laws" if history is not to be, as it often is, merely anarchical, "the register of the crimes, follies and misfortunes of mankind". It was because he believed intensely in civic virtue that he deplored the attitude of the early Christians. When Roman civilisation was in danger, these men contracted out. They refused to serve the state and preferred to sit on pillars in the desert or waste their energies in sterile theological disputes. On the other hand, when the church, or churchmen, showed such a spirit, he would commend them. "Active virtue" was to be respected wherever it was expressed."

"Gibbon was an exact and exacting scholar (hence his disdain for the French philosophes who subordinated scholarship to their philosophy). He read the latest articles, subscribed to the learned journals, cited and criticised his sources. His errors are remarkably few. Of course much has been written on the subject since his time. But his scholarship and his judgement can seldom be faulted."

"Edward Gibbon...is the one irreplaceable English historian. What other 18th-century historian is still read, not only for his style, nor as a contemporary witness of events, but as an interpreter of past ages? Gibbon now seems much less dated than his great successors, Macaulay, Carlyle, Froude; nor can anyone, today, discuss the problem – the permanent problem – of the decline of the Roman Empire except in implicit dialogue with him."

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

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

"Our sympathy is cold to the relation of distant misery."

"In every deed of mischief he had a heart to resolve, a head to contrive, and a hand to execute."

"Such is the constitution of civil society, that whilst a few persons are distinguished by riches, by honors, and by knowledge, the body of the people is condemned to obscurity, ignorance and poverty. The Christian religion, which addressed itself to the whole human race, must consequently collect a far greater number of proselytes from the lower than from the superior ranks of life. This innocent and natural circumstance has been improved into a very odious imputation, which seems to be less strenuously denied by the apologists, than it is urged by the adversaries, of the faith; that the new sect of Christians was almost entirely composed of the dregs of the populace, of peasants and mechanics, of boys and women, of beggars and slaves, the last of whom might sometimes introduce the missionaries into the rich and noble families to which they belonged. These obscure teachers (such was the charge of malice and infidelity) are as mute in public as they are loquacious and dogmatical in private. Whilst they cautiously avoid the dangerous encounter of philosophers, they mingle with the rude and illiterate crowd, and insinuate themselves into those minds, whom their age, their sex, or their education, has the best disposed to receive the impression of superstitious terrors."

"But this splendid exaggeration, which even at present it would be extremely difficult to reconcile with the real state of mankind, can be considered only as the rash sally of a devout but careless writer, the measure of whose belief was regulated by that of his wishes. But neither the belief nor the wishes of the fathers can alter the truth of history."

"It was in the school of Alexandria that the Christian theology appears to have assumed a regular and scientifical form."

"A state of scepticism and suspense may amuse a few inquisitive minds. But the practice of superstition is so congenial to the multitude that, if they are forcibly awakened, they still regret the loss of their pleasing vision. ... So urgent on the vulgar is the necessity of believing, that the fall of any system of mythology will most probably be succeeded by the introduction of some other mode of superstition."