Quote

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.

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
Full
Solution
Substances
Water
Vast
Waters
History
Soil
Destined
Mingles
Live
Substance
Stolen
Logs
Many
Invisible
Distant
Soils
Things
Rivers
Resurrection
Propels
Like
Solutions
Holds
Vegetation
Dead
River
Debris

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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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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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Of course, clothing fashions have always been impractical, except in Tahiti.
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Baseball is a kind of collective chess with arms and legs in full play under sunlight.
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If civilization has risen from the Stone Age, it can rise again from the Wastepaper Age.
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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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Above all, do not talk yourself out of good ideas by trying to expound them at haphazard meetings.
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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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Teaching is not a lost art, but the regard for it is a lost tradition.
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The book, like the bicycle, is a perfect form.
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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 one thing that unifies men in a given age is not their individual philosophies but the dominant problem that these philosophies are designed to solve.
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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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Tennis belongs to the individualistic past - a hero, or at most a pair of friends or lovers, against the world.
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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 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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When people accept futility and the absurd as normal, the culture is decadent.
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An artist has every right - one may even say a duty - to exhibit his productions as prominently as he can.
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Music is intended and designed for sentient beings that have hopes and purposes and emotions.
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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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