Quote

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.

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
Doubt
Happenings
Wonder
Happening
Seeing
Distance
Games
Watches
Prolonged
Take
Watch
Emergency
Like
Drink
Emergencies
Football
Spectators
Game
Neurotic

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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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If civilization has risen from the Stone Age, it can rise again from the Wastepaper Age.
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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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Baseball is a kind of collective chess with arms and legs in full play under sunlight.
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Simple English is no one’s mother tongue. It has to be worked for.
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I have always been - I think any student of history almost inevitably is - a cheerful pessimist.
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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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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.
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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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When people accept futility and the absurd as normal, the culture is decadent.
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Science is, in the best and strictest sense, glorious entertainment
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Bernard Shaw remains the only model we have of what the citizen of a democracy should be: an informed participant in all things we deem important to the society and the individual.
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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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The intellectuals' chief cause of anguish are one another's works.
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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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The truth is, when all is said and done, one does not teach a subject, one teaches a student how to learn it.
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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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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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Of course, clothing fashions have always been impractical, except in Tahiti.
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