Wednesday, November 12, 2014

'a few barren and lifeless truths'

I am convinced that the method of teaching which approaches most nearly to the method of investigation, is incomparably the best; since not content with serving up a few barren and lifeless truths, it leads to the stock on which they grew; it tends to set the reader himself in the track of invention, and to direct him into those paths in which the author has made his own discoveries . . .
Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1759, second edition)

Monday, November 3, 2014

A Vatican Heist

There once were two goats and one Christ
Who plotted a Vatican heist
They let down a rope
To pull up the Pope
But a bishop would have to suffice.
Matt Izzi, Correspondence (2014)