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Bad writing, it is easily verified, has never kept scholarship from being published.

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
Published
Kept
Easily
Writing
Never
Verified
Scholarship

More quotes by Jacques Barzun

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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.
Jacques Barzun
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I have always been - I think any student of history almost inevitably is - a cheerful pessimist.
Jacques Barzun
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You never step in the same river of thought twice, because neither you nor it are the same.
Jacques Barzun
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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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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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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.
Jacques Barzun
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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.
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.
Jacques Barzun
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Music is intended and designed for sentient beings that have hopes and purposes and emotions.
Jacques Barzun
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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.
Jacques Barzun
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Above all, do not talk yourself out of good ideas by trying to expound them at haphazard meetings.
Jacques Barzun
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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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Science is, in the best and strictest sense, glorious entertainment
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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.
Jacques Barzun
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Only a great mind that is overthrown yields tragedy
Jacques Barzun
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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.
Jacques Barzun
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Intellect has nothing to do with equality except to respect it as a sublime convention.
Jacques Barzun
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We may complain and cavil at the anarchy which is the amateurs natural element, but in soberness we must agree that if the amateur did not exist it would be necessary to invent him.
Jacques Barzun
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The book, like the bicycle, is a perfect form.
Jacques Barzun
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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.
Jacques Barzun