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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
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
Things
Rivers
Resurrection
Propels

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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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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 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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Above all, do not talk yourself out of good ideas by trying to expound them at haphazard meetings.
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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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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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Art distills sensation and embodies it with enhanced meaning in a memorable form - or else it is not art.
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Bad writing, it is easily verified, has never kept scholarship from being published.
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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, 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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Great cultural changes begin in affectation and end in routine.
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Music is intended and designed for sentient beings that have hopes and purposes and emotions.
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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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Only a great mind that is overthrown yields tragedy
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Finding oneself was a misnomer a self is not found but made.
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On reflection, moral judgment in the arts appears rather as a tribute to their power to influence emotion and possibly conduct. And reflecting further on what some critics do today, one sees that a good many have merely shifted the ground of their moralism, transferring their impulse of righteousness to politics and social issues.
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The intellectuals' chief cause of anguish are one another's works.
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Life is given us as a passion.
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Science is, in the best and strictest sense, glorious entertainment
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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
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