Quote

Take a portion of wit, And fashion it fit, Like a needle, with point and with eye: A point that can wound, An eye to look round, And at folly or vice let it fly

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
Needle
Look
Wounds
Needles
Looks
Round
Portion
Take
Rounds
Like
Vices
Wound
Fit
Portions
Fashion
Wit
Point
Vice
Eye
Folly

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After being boxed in by man and his constructions in Europe and the East, the release into space is exhilarating. The horizon is a huge remote circle, and no hills intervene.
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Finding oneself was a misnomer a self is not found but made.
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Teaching is not a lost art, but the regard for it is a lost tradition.
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If civilization has risen from the Stone Age, it can rise again from the Wastepaper Age.
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To watch a football game is to be in a prolonged neurotic doubt as to what you're seeing. It's more like an emergency happening at a distance than a game. I don't wonder the spectators take to drink.
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Bad writing, it is easily verified, has never kept scholarship from being published.
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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 book, like the bicycle, is a perfect form.
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Intellect has nothing to do with equality except to respect it as a sublime convention.
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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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Education in the United States is a passion and a paradox. Millions want it, and commend it, and are busy about it. At the same time they degrade it by trying to get it free of charge and free of work.
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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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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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Baseball is a kind of collective chess with arms and legs in full play under sunlight.
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The intellectuals' chief cause of anguish are one another's works.
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Highly-adaptive, informal networks move diagonally and eliptically, skipping entire functions to get things done.
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Life is given us as a passion.
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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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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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Simple English is no one’s mother tongue. It has to be worked for.
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