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Only a great mind that is overthrown yields tragedy

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
Overthrown
Yields
Yield
Tragedy
Great
Mind

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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.
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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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The intellectuals' chief cause of anguish are one another's works.
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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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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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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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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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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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Art distills sensation and embodies it with enhanced meaning in a memorable form - or else it is not art.
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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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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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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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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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