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.
If you educate a boy, you educate a person, but if you educate a girl, you educate a family and benefit an entire community.β An entire community - now that is really interesting! Then I found the quote changed a little more on the Kingdom of Jordan website by her Royal Majesty Queen Rania of Jordan during her interview with Oprah Winfrey. Queen Rania relates the quote in these words: βAs you educate a woman, you educate the family. If you educate the girls, you educate the future.
I view it as one of the greatest crimes to shadow the minds of the young with these gloomy superstitions, and with fears of the unknown and the unknowable to poison all their joy in life.
Experiment! Meet new people. Thatβs better than any college education . . . By adventuring; about, you become accustomed to the unexpected. The unexpected then becomes what it really is . . . the inevitable.
All practical teachers know that education is a patient process of mastery of details, minute by minute, hour by hour, day by day.
TV serves us most usefully when presenting junk-entertainment; it serves us most ill when it co-opts serious modes of discourse - news, politics, science, education, commerce, religion.
Our lives are greatly enriched when we immerse ourselves in literature and spiritual writing, not because we are going to be tested but purely for the sake of enrichment.
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