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

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Music, not being made up of objects nor referring to objects, is intangible and ineffable it can only be as it were inhaled by the spirit: the rest is silence.
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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 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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Tennis belongs to the individualistic past - a hero, or at most a pair of friends or lovers, against the world.
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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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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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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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Above all, the ability to feel the force of an argument apart from the substance it deals with is the strongest weapon against prejudice.
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The intellectuals' chief cause of anguish are one another's works.
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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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Democracy, to maintain itself, must repeatedly conquer every cell and corner of the nation. How many of our public institutions and private businesses, our schools, hospitals, and domestic hearths are in reality little fascist states where freedom of speech is more rigorously excluded than vermin?
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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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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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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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If civilization has risen from the Stone Age, it can rise again from the Wastepaper Age.
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The book, like the bicycle, is a perfect form.
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Music is intended and designed for sentient beings that have hopes and purposes and emotions.
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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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I have always been - I think any student of history almost inevitably is - a cheerful pessimist.
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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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