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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.

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
Room
Grown
Rooms
Excellence
Name
Piano
Tortured
Education
Sign
Bourgeois
Names
Prosperity
Furniture
Social
Drawing
Devices
Young
Entertainment
Instrument
Music
Instruments
Massive

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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.
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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 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.
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Great cultural changes begin in affectation and end in routine.
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The philosophical implication of race-thinking is that by offering us the mystery of heredity as an explanation, it diverts our attention from the social and intellectual factors that make up personality.
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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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Life is given us as a passion.
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Bad writing, it is easily verified, has never kept scholarship from being published.
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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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Teaching is not a lost art, but the regard for it is a lost tradition.
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Above all, do not talk yourself out of good ideas by trying to expound them at haphazard meetings.
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[T]hat is the triumph of history - truth absolute is not at hand the original with which to match the copy does not exist.
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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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Finding oneself was a misnomer a self is not found but made.
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