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You never step in the same river of thought twice, because neither you nor it are the same.

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
Rivers
Neither
Step
Steps
Thought
Never
Twice
River

More quotes by Jacques Barzun

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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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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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An artist has every right - one may even say a duty - to exhibit his productions as prominently as he can.
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Intellect has nothing to do with equality except to respect it as a sublime convention.
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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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Bad writing, it is easily verified, has never kept scholarship from being published.
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Baseball is a kind of collective chess with arms and legs in full play under sunlight.
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To denounce does not free the self from what it hates, any more than ignoring the past shuts off its influence.
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Schools are not intended to moralize a wicked world, but to impart knowledge and develop intelligence, with only two social aims in mind: prepare to take on one's share in the world's work, and perhaps in addition, lend a hand in improving society, after schooling is done.
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Out of man's mind in free play comes the creation Science. It renews itself, like the generations, thanks to an activity which is the best game of homo ludens: science is in the strictest and best sense a glorious entertainment.
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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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By the time I was 9, I had the conviction that everybody in the world was an artist except plumbers or people who delivered groceries.
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Teaching is not a lost art, but the regard for it is a lost tradition.
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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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Art distills sensation and embodies it with enhanced meaning in a memorable form - or else it is not art.
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Life is given us as a passion.
Jacques Barzun
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Democracy, to maintain itself, must repeatedly conquer every cell and corner of the nation. How many of our public institutions and private businesses, our schools, hospitals, and domestic hearths are in reality little fascist states where freedom of speech is more rigorously excluded than vermin?
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Like Rousseau, whom he resembles even more than he resembles Voltaire, Shaw never gave a social form to his assertiveness, never desired to arrive and to assimilate himself, or wield authority as of right.
Jacques Barzun
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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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Speech, after all, is in some measure an expression of character, and flexibility in its use is a good way to tell your friends from the robots.
Jacques Barzun