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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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Jacques Barzun
Age: 104 †
Born: 1907
Born: November 30
Died: 2012
Died: October 25
Critic
Cultural Historian
Historian
Philosopher
University Teacher
Writer
Age
Individual
Given
Unifies
Problem
Philosophies
Thing
Dominant
Men
Designed
Solve
Philosophy

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Finding oneself was a misnomer a self is not found but made.
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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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In teaching you cannot see the fruit of a day's work. It is invisible and remains so, maybe for twenty years.
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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.
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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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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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Intellect has nothing to do with equality except to respect it as a sublime convention.
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Bad writing, it is easily verified, has never kept scholarship from being published.
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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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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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Except among those whose education has been in the minimalist style, it is understood that hasty moral judgments about the past are a form of injustice.
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Music is intended and designed for sentient beings that have hopes and purposes and emotions.
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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.
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An artist has every right - one may even say a duty - to exhibit his productions as prominently as he can.
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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.
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Only a great mind that is overthrown yields tragedy
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Old age is like learning a new profession. And not one of your own choosing.
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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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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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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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