Quote

To delve into history entails, besides the grievance of hard work, the danger that in the depths one may lose one’s scapegoats.

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
Lose
Delve
Loses
Entails
History
Scapegoat
May
Grievance
Hard
Depths
Work
Besides
Depth
Danger
Scapegoats

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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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For the educated, the authority of science rested on the strictness of its methods for the mass, it rested on the powers of explanation.
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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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Teaching is not a lost art, but the regard for it is a lost tradition.
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When people accept futility and the absurd as normal, the culture is decadent.
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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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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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You never step in the same river of thought twice, because neither you nor it are the same.
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Music is intended and designed for sentient beings that have hopes and purposes and emotions.
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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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I have always been - I think any student of history almost inevitably is - a cheerful pessimist.
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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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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 an all-pervasive energy, for it is at once a mode of thought, a source of strong emotion, and a faith as fanatical as any in history.
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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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Finding oneself was a misnomer a self is not found but made.
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Out of man's mind in free play comes the creation Science. It renews itself, like the generations, thanks to an activity which is the best game of homo ludens: science is in the strictest and best sense a glorious entertainment.
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Baseball is a kind of collective chess with arms and legs in full play under sunlight.
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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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Let us face a pluralistic world in which there are no universal churches, no single remedy for all diseases, no one way to teach or write or sing, no magic diet, no world poets, and no chosen races, but only the wretched and wonderfully diversified human race.
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