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.
Students throughout the totalitarian world risk life and limb for freedom of expression, many American college students are demanding that big brother restrict their freedom of speech on campus. This demand for enhanced censorship is not emanating only from the usual corner - the know-nothing fundamentalist right - it is coming from the radical, and increasingly not-so-radical left as well.
But because we've all been readers, we know what the experience is like, and we hope that what certain writers have given to us, we will give to someone.
There are no books in this world that everybody must read, but only books that a person must read at a certain time in a given place under given circumstances and at a given period of his life.
We have an education and business culture that tends to reward quick factual answers over imaginative inquiry. Questioning isnβt encouraged - it is barely tolerated.
So many organizations have a mentoring arm, but they don't really do it. Their idea of mentoring a kid is giving them general advice. But what they need to do is read with children.
Learning options will indeed mushroom for business students and leaders, but it will take prudence and shrewdness to find and utilize the best option.
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