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Art distills sensation and embodies it with enhanced meaning in a memorable form - or else it is not art.

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
Memorable
Meaning
Art
Distills
Else
Embodies
Form
Enhanced
Sensation
Sensations

More quotes by Jacques Barzun

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Highly-adaptive, informal networks move diagonally and eliptically, skipping entire functions to get things done.
Jacques Barzun
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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.
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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Take a portion of wit, And fashion it fit, Like a needle, with point and with eye: A point that can wound, An eye to look round, And at folly or vice let it fly
Jacques Barzun
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When people accept futility and the absurd as normal, the culture is decadent.
Jacques Barzun
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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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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.
Jacques Barzun
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The ever-present impulse is to push against restriction and, in so doing, to feel intolerably hemmed in. Thus in practice, every liberation increases the sense of oppression. Nor is the paradox merely in the mind: the laws enacted to secure the rights of every person and group, by creating protective boundaries, create new barriers.
Jacques Barzun
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Teaching is not a lost art, but the regard for it is a lost tradition.
Jacques Barzun
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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.
Jacques Barzun
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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.
Jacques Barzun
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An artist has every right - one may even say a duty - to exhibit his productions as prominently as he can.
Jacques Barzun
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Of course, clothing fashions have always been impractical, except in Tahiti.
Jacques Barzun
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Life is given us as a passion.
Jacques Barzun
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On reflection, moral judgment in the arts appears rather as a tribute to their power to influence emotion and possibly conduct. And reflecting further on what some critics do today, one sees that a good many have merely shifted the ground of their moralism, transferring their impulse of righteousness to politics and social issues.
Jacques Barzun
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Old age is like learning a new profession. And not one of your own choosing.
Jacques Barzun
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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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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.
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