The best and most important part of every man's education is that which he gives himself.
Interpretation
Self-education is the most valuable aspect of learning.
This quote emphasizes the idea that personal initiative in education is more significant than formal education. Edward Gibbon suggests that the knowledge and skills we cultivate on our own determine our true understanding and progression, highlighting the importance of self-directed learning throughout life.
In practice
Using this quote in a speech about lifelong learning at a community college graduation.
It was Rome, on the fifteenth of October, 1764, as I sat musing amidst the ruins of the Capitol, while the barefooted friars were singing vespers in the Temple of Jupiter, that the idea of writing the decline and fall of the city first started to my mind.
I will not dissemble the first emotions of joy on the recovery of my freedom, and, perhaps, the establishment of my fame. But my pride was soon humbled, and a sober melancholy was spread over my mind, by the idea that I had taken an everlasting leave of an old and agreeable companion, and that whatsoever might be the future date of my History, the life of the historian must be short and precarious.
And the winds and the waves are always on the side of the ablest navigators.
The first and indispensable requisite of happiness is a clear conscience.
In discussing Barbarism and Christianity I have actually been discussing the Fall of Rome.
Many a sober Christian would rather admit that a wafer is God than that God is a cruel and capricious tyrant.
The most important skill to acquire now is learning how to learn.
I'm still a bit of a reading glutton, I think, because I browse, read a bit of the back copy, flip through the book, read a bit of the text, and if it still seems fascinating, I read it. That's why my bedside table is so cluttered: I want to imbibe it all.
Literature was the passport to enter a larger life; that is, the zone of freedom. Literature was freedom. Especially in a time in which the values of reading and inwardness are so strenuously challenged, literature is freedom.
Likewise, there is no evidence that texting teaches people to spell badly: rather, research shows that those kids who text frequently are more likely to be the most literate and the best spellers, because you have to know how to manipulate language.
All that being a college coach has done, is it's reaffirmed the need to take care of our young people. They're the ones that are going to make a difference. We spend a lot of time blaming them for stuff, and not enough time mentoring them and helping them stand on their own two feet.
Every time I've flown an aircraft, or visited a steelworks, or watched a panel-beater at work, I've learned something new that can be applied to buildings.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.