Edward Gibbon Quotes

I would not say that I was, these days, a 'student' of philosophy, although in my youth I was quite deeply involved with certain aspects of the British pragmatists.

All thought is naught but a footnote to Plato.

All their sport in the park is but a shadow to that pleasure that I find in Plato; alas good folk, they never felt what true pleasure meant.

The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato.

Philosophy is an elegant thing, if anyone modestly meddles with it; but if they are conversant with it more than is becoming, it corrupts them.

To write about history or language is supposed to be within the reach of every man. To write about natural science is allowed to be within the reach only of those who have mastered the subjects on which they write.

There are not in the world at any one time more than a dozen persons who read and understand Plato:-never enough to pay for an edition of his works; yet to every generation these come duly down, for the sake of those few persons, as if God brought them written in his hand.

My mind was formed by studying philosophy, Plato and that sort of thing.

By Hercules! I prefer to err with Plato, whom I know how much you value, than to be right in the company of such men.

Out of Plato come all things that are still written and debated about among men of thought.

For, strictly considered, what is all Knowledge too but recorded Experience, and a product of History; of which, therefore, Reasoning and Belief, no less than Action and Passion, are essential materials?

Aristotle and Plato are reckoned the respective heads of two schools. A wise man will see that Aristotle platonizes.

Let experience solve it. To listen to mere speculation in such a case were criminal.

We live not only in a world of thoughts, but also in a world of things. Words without experience are meaningless.

The more I study the things of the mind the more mathematical I find them. In them as in mathematics it is a question of quantities; they must be treated with precision. I have never had more satisfaction than in proving this in the realms of art, politics and history.

That Plato's Republic should have been admired, on its political side, by decent people, is perhaps the most astonishing example of literary snobbery in all history.

My God, but what do I care about the laws of nature and arithmatic if for some reason these laws and two times two is four are not to my liking?

I belong to those theoreticians who know by direct observation what it means to make a measurement. Methinks it were better if there were more of them.

But there remains the question: what righteousness really is. The method and secret and sweet reasonableness of Jesus.

The fate of an epoch that has eaten of the tree of knowledge is that it must...recognize that general views of life and the universe can never be the products of increasing empirical knowledge, and that the highest ideals, which move us most forcefully, are always formed only in the struggle with other ideals which are just as sacred to others as ours are to us.

This is what they all come to who exclusively harp on experience. They do not stop to consider that experience is only one half of experience.

Geology holds the keys of one of the kingdoms of nature; and it cannot be said that a science which extends our Knowledge, and by consequence our Power, over a third part of nature, holds a low place among intellectual employments.

Where there is truth, there also is knowledge which is true.

Life, liberty, and the pursuit of property were just what Aristotle did not talk about. They are the conditions of happiness; but the essence of happiness, according to Aristotle, is virtue. So the moderns decided to deal with the conditions and to let happiness take care of itself.

Philosophy, from the earliest times, has made greater claims, and achieved fewer results, than any other branch of learning.