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.
Sadly, so many arts programs have been eliminated from schools due to budget constraints. These creative outlets are so very important, not only for a child's well-being, but also for self-expression and fun.
Young children possess the ability to cut across the customary categories; to appreciate usually undiscerned links among realms, to respond effectively in a parallel manner to events which are usually categorized differently, and to capture these ori
A society's competitive advantage will come not from how well its schools teach the multiplication and periodic tables, but from how well they stimulate imagination and creativity.
The student has his Rome, his Florence, his whole glowing Italy, within the four walls of his library. He has in his books the ruins of an antique world and the glories of a modern one.
Next in importance to freedom and justice is popular education, without which neither freedom nor justice can be permanently maintained.
The function of education is to teach one to think intensively and to think critically. Intelligence plus character - that is the goal of true education.
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