“The bones… are given in a heap to a student who has no idea of a skeleton. Here is the defect which I am trying partly to supply…”
Preface
A Companion to School Classics (1888)
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James Gow (scholar) 22
scholar 1854–1923Related quotes

On the Tombs in Westminster Abbey http://www.englishverse.com/poems/on_the_tombs_in_westminster_abbey

Part I, Essay 16: The Stoic
Essays, Moral, Political, and Literary (1741-2; 1748)
Context: If nature has been frugal in her gifts and endowments, there is the more need of art to supply her defects. If she has been generous and liberal, know that she still expects industry and application on our part, and revenges herself in proportion to our negligent ingratitude. The richest genius, like the most fertile soil, when uncultivated, shoots up into the rankest weeds; and instead of vines and olives for the pleasure and use of man, produces, to its slothful owner, the most abundant crop of poisons.

16 September 1902
Source: Willa Cather in Europe (1956), Ch. 14

"The Christian System" in Religion: A Dialogue, and Other Essays (1910) as translated by Thomas Bailey Saunders, p. 105
Context: When the Church says that, in the dogmas of religion, reason is totally incompetent and blind, and its use to be reprehended, this really attests the fact that these dogmas are allegorical in their nature, and are not to be judged by the standard which reason, taking all things sensu proprio, can alone apply. Now the absurdities of a dogma are just the mark and sign of what is allegorical and mythical in it. In the case under consideration, however, the absurdities spring from the fact that two such heterogeneous doctrines as those of the Old and New Testaments had to be combined. The great allegory was of gradual growth. Suggested by external and adventitious circumstances, it was developed by the interpretation put upon them, an interpretation in quiet touch with certain deep-lying truths only half realised. The allegory was finally completed by Augustine, who penetrated deepest into its meaning, and so was able to conceive it as a systematic whole and supply its defects.
As quoted in Contemporary Artists: A-K (2002) by Sara Pendergast and Tom Pendergast, p. 680
Context: I feel that we are living a very fragmented life; the whole world — you too. So I perceive the world in fragments. It is somewhat like being on a very fast train and getting glimpses of things in strange scales as you pass by. A person can be very, very tiny. And a billboard can make a person very large. You see the corner of a house or you see a bird fly by, and it's all fragmented. Somehow, in painting I try to make some logic out of the world that has been given to me in chaos. I have a very pretentious idea that I want to make life, I want to make sense out of it. The fact that I am doomed to failure — that doesn't deter me in the least.