And the winds and the waves are always on the side of the ablest navigators.
Interpretation
Skilled individuals are better equipped to handle challenges that come their way.
This quote by Edward Gibbon emphasizes that those who possess knowledge and skills are more capable of overcoming obstacles. Just as navigators skillfully manage the tumultuous winds and waves of the sea, competent individuals can leverage their abilities to steer through life's difficulties more effectively.
In practice
In a motivational speech about facing life's difficulties wisely.
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.
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 theologian may indulge the pleasing task of describing Religion as she descended from Heaven, arrayed in her native purity. A more melancholy duty is imposed on the historian. He must discover the inevitable mixture of error and corruption which she contracted in a long residence upon Earth, among a weak and degenerate race of beings.
That is the mystery of grace: it never comes too late.
Marking dynamos for repair $10,000.00-2 hours labor $10.00; knowing where to mark $9,990.00.
Guns aren't lawful; nooses give; gas smells awful. So you might as well live.
There is no good in anything until it is finished.
There's a place in you that you must keep inviolate. You must keep it pristine. Clean. So that nobody has a right to curse you or treat you badly. Nobody. No mother, father, no wife, no husband, noΒΒΒ-nobody. You have to have a place where you say: 'Stop it. Back up. Don't you know I'm a child of God?
Ideals are like the stars: we never reach them, but like the mariners of the sea, we chart our course by them.
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