My early and invincible love of reading I would not exchange for all the riches of India.
Interpretation
The love of reading holds greater value than material wealth.
In this quote, Edward Gibbon emphasizes the profound and lasting impact that a passion for reading has on an individual. He suggests that the joy and knowledge gained from reading are far more precious than any material possessions, highlighting the importance of intellectual enrichment over financial gain.
In practice
In a speech to motivate students, one could say, 'As Gibbon said, my early and invincible love of reading I would not exchange for all the riches of India.'
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.
New insights fail to get put into practice because they conflict with deeply held internal images of how the world works...images that limit us to familiar ways of thinking and acting. That is why the discipline of managing mental models - surfacing, testing, and improving our internal pictures of how the world works - promises to be a major breakthrough for learning organizations.
The Gospel which we possess was not given to us only to be admired, talked of, and professed - but to be practiced.
There's a common perception among college administrators that they should conceal the high level of sexual assaults that take place on their campuses because it would bring discredit to the university, bring them a bad name if it was publicized.
There are five Gospels: Matthew, Mark, Luke, John and the Christian. Most people will never read the first four.
As I teach, I project the condition of my soul onto my students, my subject, and our way of being together.
So far has Athens left the rest of mankind behind in thought and expression that her pupils have become the teachers of the world, and she has made the name of Hellas distinctive no longer of race but of intellect, and the title of Hellene a badge of education rather than of common descent.
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