Edward Gibbon Age Quotations

When Julian ascended the throne, he declared his impatience to embrace and reward the Syrian sophist, who had preserved, in a degenerate age, the Grecian purity of taste, of manners and of religion. The emperor's prepossession was increased and justified by the discreet pride of his favourite.

It is the common calamity of old age to lose whatever might have rendered it desirable....

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.

[Every age], however destitute of science or virtue, sufficiently abounds with acts of blood and military renown.

The criminal penalties [for suicide] are the production of a later and darker age.

[The] emperor of the West, the feeble and dissolute Valentinian, [had] reached his thirty-fifth year without attaining the age of reason or courage.

The revolution of ages may bring round the same calamities; but ages may revolve without producing a Tacitus to describe them.

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

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

The ruin of Paganism, in the age of Theodosius, is perhaps the only example of the total extirpation of any ancient and popular superstition; and may therefore deserve to be considered, as a singular event in the history of the human mind.