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[T]hat is the triumph of history - truth absolute is not at hand the original with which to match the copy does not exist.

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
Hands
Triumph
Truth
Originals
Doe
Absolutes
Original
Absolute
Copy
Exist
Copies
Hand
Match
History
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Old age is like learning a new profession. And not one of your own choosing.
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Highly-adaptive, informal networks move diagonally and eliptically, skipping entire functions to get things done.
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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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Only a great mind that is overthrown yields tragedy
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Life is given us as a passion.
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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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Except among those whose education has been in the minimalist style, it is understood that hasty moral judgments about the past are a form of injustice.
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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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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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Of course, clothing fashions have always been impractical, except in Tahiti.
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Finding oneself was a misnomer a self is not found but made.
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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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Strangers who have seen Shaw face to face are wont to report their surprise at his gentleness and consideration, his willingness to listen and his complete lack of pose.
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For the educated, the authority of science rested on the strictness of its methods for the mass, it rested on the powers of explanation.
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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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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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When people accept futility and the absurd as normal, the culture is decadent.
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The intellectuals' chief cause of anguish are one another's works.
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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.
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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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