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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.

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

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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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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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Art distills sensation and embodies it with enhanced meaning in a memorable form - or else it is not art.
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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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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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Bad writing, it is easily verified, has never kept scholarship from being published.
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The intellectuals' chief cause of anguish are one another's works.
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I'll read, and then I'll take naps. When I feel sleep coming on, I give in and don't fight it.
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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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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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Baseball is a kind of collective chess with arms and legs in full play under sunlight.
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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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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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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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Simple English is no one’s mother tongue. It has to be worked for.
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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 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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Above all, do not talk yourself out of good ideas by trying to expound them at haphazard meetings.
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Schools are not intended to moralize a wicked world, but to impart knowledge and develop intelligence, with only two social aims in mind: prepare to take on one's share in the world's work, and perhaps in addition, lend a hand in improving society, after schooling is done.
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Old age is like learning a new profession. And not one of your own choosing.
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