C.N. Douglas, comp. Forty Thousand Quotations: Prose and Poetical. 1917.
Gibbon
A heart to resolve, a head to contrive, and a hand to execute.
A taste for books, which is still the pleasure and glory of my life.
All that is human must retrograde if it do not advance.
Amiable weakness of human nature.
Beauty is an outward gift which is seldom despised except by those to whom it has been refused.
Conversation enriches the understanding, but solitude is the school of genius.
Gratitude is expensive.
History should be to the political economist a wellspring of experience and wisdom.
History, which is, indeed, little more than the register of the crimes, follies, and misfortunes of mankind.
I saw and loved.
I was never less alone than when by myself.
It was among the ruins of the capitol that I first conceived the idea of a work which has amused and exercised nearly twenty years of my life.
Let us read with method, and propose to ourselves an end to what our studies may point. The use of reading is to aid us in thinking.
My early and invincible love of reading,***I would not exchange for the treasures of India.
Revenge is profitable.
The best and most important part of every man’s education is that which he gives himself.
The generality of princes, if they were stripped of their purple and cast naked on the world, would immediately sink to the lowest rank of society, without a hope of emerging from their obscurity.
The Indian who fells the tree that he may gather the fruit, and the Arab who plunders the caravans of commerce are actuated by the same impulse of savage nature, and relinquish for momentary rapine the long and secure possession of the most important blessings.
The love of study, a passion which derives fresh vigor from enjoyment, supplies each day, each hour, with a perpetual source of independent and rational pleasure.
The nobility of the Spencers has been illustrated and enriched by the trophies of Marlborough; but I exhort them to consider the “Faerie Queene,” as the most priceless jewel of their coroner.
The pathetic almost always consists in the detail of little circumstances.
The winds and waves are always on the side of the ablest navigators.
Those faithful mirrors, which reflect to our mind the minds of sages and heroes.
Vicissitudes of fortune, which spare neither man nor the proudest of his works, which bury empires and cities in a common grave.