Edward Gibbon Quotes

No passion so effectually robs the mind of all its powers of acting and reasoning as fear.

Natural disasters are terrifying - that loss of control, this feeling that something is just going to randomly end your life for absolutely no reason is terrifying. But, what scares me is the human reaction to it and how people behave when the rules of civility and society are obliterated.

Commerce has not delivered us out of history’s passions, the World Wide Web has not cast aside blood and kin and faith.

… people are far from acting generally according to the dictates of their interests, but oftener in consequence of their passions, though it may even prove injurious to their interests.

Among other things, you'll find that you're not the first one who was ever confused and frightened and even sickened by human behavior.

Conscience is the voice of the soul, the passions are the voice of the body. It is strange that these voices often contradict each other?

Take mankind as they are, and what are they governed by? Their passions.

Knowledge of mankind is a knowledge of their passions.

Jealousy ... survives every other passion of mankind.

As men are affected in all ages by the same passions, the occasions which bring about great changes are different, but the causes are always the same.

From the passions arise worry, and from worry arises fear. Away with the passions, and no fear, no worry.

I think that nobody - certainly in this world - can say that they don't have the human denial element about them or fear or whatever it is as juxtaposed with faith and hope and freedom and love.

The chief cause of our misery is less the violence of our passions than the feebleness of our virtues.

Of all the passions, fear weakens judgment most.

School was more than academics; an education prepared you for the humdrum of real life: working with others, tempering one's personality to assimilate with the group but without losing your individual identity, understading the factors of logic, reasoning, and debate. For a person - vampire or human - to succeed in the world, unlocking the mysteries of the universe was insufficient. One would also need to grasp the mysteries of human nature.

Wherefore did he [God] create passions within us, pleasures round about us, but that these rightly tempered are the very ingredients of virtue?

We are like vessels tossed on the bosom of the deep; our passions are the winds that sweep us impetuously forward; each pleasure is a rock; the whole life is a wide ocean. Reason is the pilot to guide us, but often allows itself to be led astray by the storms of pride.

The latent causes of faction are thus sown in the nature of man; and we see them everywhere brought into different degrees of activity, according to the different circumstances of civil society.

I thought, "Why? and how did we evolve with this weak, and useless passion in tact within the deep heart's core?" And the answer as I've formulated it to myself is that empathy is the engine that powers all the best in us.

In order to judge of the inside of others, study your own; for men in general are very much alike; and though one has one prevailing passion, and another has another, yet their operations are much the same; and whatever engages or disgusts, pleases or offends you, in others, will, mutatis mutandis, engage, disgust, please, or offend others, in you.

Men are the only animals that devote themselves, day in and day out, to making one another unhappy. It is an art like any other. Its virtuosi are called altruists.

Everywhere man blames nature and fate, yet his fate is mostly but the echo of his character, and passions, his mistakes, and weaknesses."--Democritus An Abundance of Katherines---John Green

People's lives are forever controlled by two emotions: fear and greed.

The passions we cannot control are the ones that define us.

Person-to-person, most people are honest.