[A historian] will more seriously deplore the loss of the Byzantine libraries, which were destroyed or scattered in the general confusion: one hundred and twenty thousand manuscripts are said to have...
And it was an inflexible maxim of Roman discipline, that a good soldier should dread his officers far more than the enemy.
He forgot that the best of omens is to unsheathe our sword in the defence of our country.
So intimate is the connexion between the throne and the altar, that the banner of the church has very seldom been seen on the side of the people.
The vicissitudes of fortune, which spares neither man nor the proudest of his works, which buries empires and cities in a common grave.
Five times was Athanasius expelled from his throne; twenty years he passed as an exile or a fugitive; and almost every province of the Roman empire was successively witness to his merit, and his suffe...
The conquest of the land of Canaan was accompanied with so many wonderful and so many bloody circumstances, that the victorious Jews were left in a state of irreconcilable hostility with all their nei...
The knowledge that is suited to our situation and powers, the whole compass of moral, natural, and mathematical science, was neglected by the new Platonists; whilst they exhausted their strength in th...
The policy of the emperors and the senate, as far as it concerned religion, was happily seconded by the reflections of the enlightened, and by the habits of the superstitious, part of their subjects....
Twenty-two acknowledged concubines and a library of sixty-two thousand volumes attested the variety of his inclinations; and from the productions he left behind him, it appears the former as well as t...
Hope, the best comfort of our imperfect condition.
The five marks of the Roman decaying culture:Concern with displaying affluence instead of building wealth;Obsession with sex and perversions of sex;Art becomes freakish and sensationalistic instead of...
The names of Seneca, of the elder and the younger Pliny, of Tacitus, of Plutarch, of Galen, of the slave Epictetus, and of the emperor Marcus Antoninus, adorn the age in which they flourished, and exa...
History is little more than the register of the crimes, follies, and misfortunes of mankind.
Conversation enriches the understanding but solitude is the school of genius.
He who sows the ground with care and diligence acquires a greater stock of religious merit than he could gain by the repetition of ten thousand prayers. ^15
If we contrast the rapid progress of this mischievous discovery [of gunpowder] with the slow and laborious advances of reason, science, and the arts of peace, a philosopher, according to his temper, w...
In the cool shade of retirement, we may easily devise imaginary forms of government, in which the sceptre shall be constantly bestowed on the most worthy, by the free and incorrupt suffrage of the who...
The public highways, which had been constructed for the use of the legions, opened an easy passage for the Christians missionaries from Damascus to Corinth, and from Italy to the extremity of Spain or...
The various modes of worship which prevailed in the Roman world were all considered by the people as equally true; by the philosopher as equally false; and by the magistrate as equally useful. And thu...
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