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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
Never
Twice
River
Rivers
Neither
Step
Steps
Thought

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The book, like the bicycle, is a perfect form.
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We may complain and cavil at the anarchy which is the amateurs natural element, but in soberness we must agree that if the amateur did not exist it would be necessary to invent him.
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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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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.
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The philosophical implication of race-thinking is that by offering us the mystery of heredity as an explanation, it diverts our attention from the social and intellectual factors that make up personality.
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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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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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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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Simple English is no one’s mother tongue. It has to be worked for.
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The truth is, when all is said and done, one does not teach a subject, one teaches a student how to learn it.
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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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If civilization has risen from the Stone Age, it can rise again from the Wastepaper Age.
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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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Above all, the ability to feel the force of an argument apart from the substance it deals with is the strongest weapon against prejudice.
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The educated man had throughout the ages found a way to covert passionate activity into silent and motionless pleasure. He can sit still in a room and not perish.
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Finding oneself was a misnomer a self is not found but made.
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Intellect has nothing to do with equality except to respect it as a sublime convention.
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Music is intended and designed for sentient beings that have hopes and purposes and emotions.
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Teaching is not a lost art, but the regard for it is a lost tradition.
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[T]hat is the triumph of history - truth absolute is not at hand the original with which to match the copy does not exist.
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