# Quote — Robertson Davies, The Cornish Trilogy

> Because real teaching demands energy as well. To instruct calls for energy, and to remain almost silent, but watchful and helpful, while students instruct themselves, calls for even greater energy. To see someone fall … when a word from you would keep him on his feet but ignorant of an important danger, is one of the tasks of the teacher that calls for special energy, because holding in is more demanding than crying out.

- Author: [Robertson Davies](https://www.leafyquotes.com/robertson-davies.md)
- Book: [The Cornish Trilogy](https://www.leafyquotes.com/robertson-davies/the-cornish-trilogy.md)
- Source: [Wikiquote](https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Cornish_Trilogy#The_Rebel_Angels) ([CC BY-SA 4.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/))
- Quote page: https://www.leafyquotes.com/robertson-davies/the-cornish-trilogy/because-real-teaching

## More from this book

> There are no great performances without great audiences, and this is the barrier that film and television, by their utmost efforts, cannot cross, for there can be no interaction between what is done, and those to whom it is done. Great theatre, great music-drama, is created again and again on both sides of the footlights.

[Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/robertson-davies/the-cornish-trilogy/there-are-no-great.md)

> Catholicism has begotten much great art; Protestantism none at all – not a single painting. But Catholicism has fostered art in the very teeth of Christianity. The Kingdom of Christ, if it ever comes, will contain no art; Christ never showed the least concern with it. His church has inspired much but not because of anything the Master said. Who then was the inspirer? The much-maligned Devil, one supposes. It is he who understands and ministers to man's carnal and intellectual self, and art is carnal and intellectual.

[Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/robertson-davies/the-cornish-trilogy/catholicism-has-begotten.md)

> Whoever lives in the finest house in a small Canadian town dwells in a House of Atreus, about which a part of the community harbours the darkest mythical suspicions...In lesser houses there may be fighting, covert abortions, children "touched up" with a hot flat-iron to make them obedient, every imaginable aspect of parsimony, incest, and simple, persistent cruelty, but these are nothing to whatever seems amiss at the Big House.

[Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/robertson-davies/the-cornish-trilogy/whoever-lives-in-the.md)