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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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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Old age is like learning a new profession. And not one of your own choosing.
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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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Like Rousseau, whom he resembles even more than he resembles Voltaire, Shaw never gave a social form to his assertiveness, never desired to arrive and to assimilate himself, or wield authority as of right.
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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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Intellect has nothing to do with equality except to respect it as a sublime convention.
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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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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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Highly-adaptive, informal networks move diagonally and eliptically, skipping entire functions to get things done.
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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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Music is intended and designed for sentient beings that have hopes and purposes and emotions.
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Speech, after all, is in some measure an expression of character, and flexibility in its use is a good way to tell your friends from the robots.
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Simple English is no one’s mother tongue. It has to be worked for.
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Of course, clothing fashions have always been impractical, except in Tahiti.
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Science is, in the best and strictest sense, glorious entertainment
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Life is given us as a passion.
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Teaching is not a lost art, but the regard for it is a lost tradition.
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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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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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