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

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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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Art distills sensation and embodies it with enhanced meaning in a memorable form - or else it is not art.
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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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Highly-adaptive, informal networks move diagonally and eliptically, skipping entire functions to get things done.
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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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Simple English is no one’s mother tongue. It has to be worked for.
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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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Intellect has nothing to do with equality except to respect it as a sublime convention.
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Finding oneself was a misnomer a self is not found but made.
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Teaching is not a lost art, but the regard for it is a lost tradition.
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If civilization has risen from the Stone Age, it can rise again from the Wastepaper Age.
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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.
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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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Bad writing, it is easily verified, has never kept scholarship from being published.
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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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Baseball is a kind of collective chess with arms and legs in full play under sunlight.
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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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I have always been - I think any student of history almost inevitably is - a cheerful pessimist.
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