Quote

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

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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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Science is, in the best and strictest sense, glorious entertainment
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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.
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Finding oneself was a misnomer a self is not found but made.
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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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We may complain and cavil at the anarchy which is the amateurs natural element, but in soberness we must agree that if the amateur did not exist it would be necessary to invent him.
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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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Baseball is a kind of collective chess with arms and legs in full play under sunlight.
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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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Only a great mind that is overthrown yields tragedy
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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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Art distills sensation and embodies it with enhanced meaning in a memorable form - or else it is not art.
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The intellectuals' chief cause of anguish are one another's works.
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Bad writing, it is easily verified, has never kept scholarship from being published.
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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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Of course, clothing fashions have always been impractical, except in Tahiti.
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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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Above all, do not talk yourself out of good ideas by trying to expound them at haphazard meetings.
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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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