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

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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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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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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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When people accept futility and the absurd as normal, the culture is decadent.
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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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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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Bad writing, it is easily verified, has never kept scholarship from being published.
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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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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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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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If civilization has risen from the Stone Age, it can rise again from the Wastepaper Age.
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Science is, in the best and strictest sense, glorious entertainment
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Highly-adaptive, informal networks move diagonally and eliptically, skipping entire functions to get things done.
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The intellectuals' chief cause of anguish are one another's works.
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Convince yourself that you are working in clay, not marble, on paper not eternal bronze: Let that first sentence be as stupid as it wishes.
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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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An artist has every right - one may even say a duty - to exhibit his productions as prominently as he can.
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Only a great mind that is overthrown yields tragedy
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Life is given us as a passion.
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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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