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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
Scholarship
Published
Kept
Easily
Writing
Never
Verified

More quotes by Jacques Barzun

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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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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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I have always been - I think any student of history almost inevitably is - a cheerful pessimist.
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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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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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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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Of course, clothing fashions have always been impractical, except in Tahiti.
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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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Bernard Shaw remains the only model we have of what the citizen of a democracy should be: an informed participant in all things we deem important to the society and the individual.
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History, like a vast river, propels logs, vegetation, rafts, and debris it is full of live and dead things, some destined for resurrection it mingles many waters and holds in solution invisible substances stolen from distant soils.
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Finding oneself was a misnomer a self is not found but made.
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When people accept futility and the absurd as normal, the culture is decadent.
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Education in the United States is a passion and a paradox. Millions want it, and commend it, and are busy about it. At the same time they degrade it by trying to get it free of charge and free of work.
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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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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In teaching you cannot see the fruit of a day's work. It is invisible and remains so, maybe for twenty years.
Jacques Barzun
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Science is, in the best and strictest sense, glorious entertainment
Jacques Barzun
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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.
Jacques Barzun
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Only a great mind that is overthrown yields tragedy
Jacques Barzun