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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.

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
Stills
Activity
Motionless
Still
Room
Covert
Way
Rooms
Perish
Men
Silence
Ages
Education
Throughout
Pleasure
Educated
Age
Passionate
Found
Silent

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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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Science is, in the best and strictest sense, glorious entertainment
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The intellectuals' chief cause of anguish are one another's works.
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The ever-present impulse is to push against restriction and, in so doing, to feel intolerably hemmed in. Thus in practice, every liberation increases the sense of oppression. Nor is the paradox merely in the mind: the laws enacted to secure the rights of every person and group, by creating protective boundaries, create new barriers.
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Simple English is no one’s mother tongue. It has to be worked for.
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Great cultural changes begin in affectation and end in routine.
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Highly-adaptive, informal networks move diagonally and eliptically, skipping entire functions to get things done.
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Bad writing, it is easily verified, has never kept scholarship from being published.
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Old age is like learning a new profession. And not one of your own choosing.
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To delve into history entails, besides the grievance of hard work, the danger that in the depths one may lose one’s scapegoats.
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Only a great mind that is overthrown yields tragedy
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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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[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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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 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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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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Time and rest are needed for absorption. Psychologists confirm that it is really in the summer that our muscles learn to skate and in the winter, how to swim.
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