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Tennis belongs to the individualistic past - a hero, or at most a pair of friends or lovers, against the world.

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
Past
Individualistic
World
Pair
Pairs
Belongs
Tennis
Lovers
Hero
Friends

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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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By the time I was 9, I had the conviction that everybody in the world was an artist except plumbers or people who delivered groceries.
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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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Art distills sensation and embodies it with enhanced meaning in a memorable form - or else it is not art.
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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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When people accept futility and the absurd as normal, the culture is decadent.
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The intellectuals' chief cause of anguish are one another's works.
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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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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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You never step in the same river of thought twice, because neither you nor it are the same.
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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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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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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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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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Old age is like learning a new profession. And not one of your own choosing.
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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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Only a great mind that is overthrown yields tragedy
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Baseball is a kind of collective chess with arms and legs in full play under sunlight.
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Finding oneself was a misnomer a self is not found but made.
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Simple English is no one’s mother tongue. It has to be worked for.
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