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The book, like the bicycle, is a perfect form.

Jacques Barzun

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Jacques Barzun
Age: 104 †
Born: 1907
Born: November 30
Died: 2012
Died: October 25
Critic
Cultural Historian
Historian
Philosopher
University Teacher
Writer
Bicycle
Perfect
Form
Book
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History, like a vast river, propels logs, vegetation, rafts, and debris it is full of live and dead things, some destined for resurrection it mingles many waters and holds in solution invisible substances stolen from distant soils.
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Simple English is no one’s mother tongue. It has to be worked for.
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Music, not being made up of objects nor referring to objects, is intangible and ineffable it can only be as it were inhaled by the spirit: the rest is silence.
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The professionals resemble and recognize each other by virtue of the stigmata that their trade has left upon them. They are like the dog in the fable, whose collar has made an indelible mark around his neck. The amateur is the shaggy wolf whom no dog had better trust too far.
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For the educated, the authority of science rested on the strictness of its methods for the mass, it rested on the powers of explanation.
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Strangers who have seen Shaw face to face are wont to report their surprise at his gentleness and consideration, his willingness to listen and his complete lack of pose.
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The one thing that unifies men in a given age is not their individual philosophies but the dominant problem that these philosophies are designed to solve.
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Baseball is a kind of collective chess with arms and legs in full play under sunlight.
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Tennis belongs to the individualistic past - a hero, or at most a pair of friends or lovers, against the world.
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The piano is the social instrument par excellence... drawing-room furniture, a sign of bourgeois prosperity, the most massive of the devices by which the young are tortured in the name of education and the grown-up in the name of entertainment.
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The greatest artists have never been men of taste. By never sophisticating their instincts they have never lost the awareness of the great simplicities, which they relish both from appetite and from the challenge these offer to skill in competition with popular art.
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Art distills sensation and embodies it with enhanced meaning in a memorable form - or else it is not art.
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Music is intended and designed for sentient beings that have hopes and purposes and emotions.
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Of course, clothing fashions have always been impractical, except in Tahiti.
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On reflection, moral judgment in the arts appears rather as a tribute to their power to influence emotion and possibly conduct. And reflecting further on what some critics do today, one sees that a good many have merely shifted the ground of their moralism, transferring their impulse of righteousness to politics and social issues.
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You never step in the same river of thought twice, because neither you nor it are the same.
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After being boxed in by man and his constructions in Europe and the East, the release into space is exhilarating. The horizon is a huge remote circle, and no hills intervene.
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In producers, loafing is productive and no creator, of whatever magnitude, has ever been able to skip that stage, any more than a mother can skip gestation.
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I'll read, and then I'll take naps. When I feel sleep coming on, I give in and don't fight it.
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In teaching you cannot see the fruit of a day's work. It is invisible and remains so, maybe for twenty years.
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