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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.

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
Done
Subjects
Students
Teacher
Teach
Learn
Science
Teaches
Truth
Student
Doe
Subject

More quotes by Jacques Barzun

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It is always some illusion that creates disillusion, especially in the young, for whom the only alternative to perfection is cynicism.
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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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Highly-adaptive, informal networks move diagonally and eliptically, skipping entire functions to get things done.
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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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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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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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Science is, in the best and strictest sense, glorious entertainment
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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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Only a great mind that is overthrown yields tragedy
Jacques Barzun
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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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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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I have always been - I think any student of history almost inevitably is - a cheerful pessimist.
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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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Education in the United States is a passion and a paradox. Millions want it, and commend it, and are busy about it. At the same time they degrade it by trying to get it free of charge and free of work.
Jacques Barzun
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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.
Jacques Barzun
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Bad writing, it is easily verified, has never kept scholarship from being published.
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To watch a football game is to be in a prolonged neurotic doubt as to what you're seeing. It's more like an emergency happening at a distance than a game. I don't wonder the spectators take to drink.
Jacques Barzun
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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.
Jacques Barzun
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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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Finding oneself was a misnomer a self is not found but made.
Jacques Barzun