Books are those faithful mirrors that reflect to our mind the minds of sages and heroes.
Interpretation
Books allow us to access and understand the thoughts of great thinkers and leaders from the past.
In this quote, Edward Gibbon emphasizes the importance of books as valuable tools for knowledge and personal growth. He likens books to mirrors that faithfully reflect the thoughts and wisdom of great figures—sages and heroes—allowing readers to learn from their insights and experiences. This highlights the role of literature in connecting us with profound ideas and the legacy of influential individuals.
In practice
In a speech on education, one might say, 'As Gibbon noted, books are those faithful mirrors that reflect the minds of sages and heroes, shaping our understanding of the world.'
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 end of all learning is to know God, and out of that knowledge to love and imitate Him.
Children will go with any story as long as it's good, but white adults sometimes think that if a black child's on the cover, it is perhaps not for them.
There is no system in the world or any school in the country that is better than its teachers. Teachers are the lifeblood of the success of schools.
Woe to him who teaches men faster than they can learn.
Teach him to think for himself? Oh, my God, teach him rather to think like other people!
It is the mark of an educated mind to rest satisfied with the degree of precision which the nature of the subject admits and not to seek exactness where only an approximation is possible.
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