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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
Doe
Absolutes
Original
Absolute
Copy
Exist
Copies
Hand
Match
History
Hats
Hands
Triumph
Truth
Originals

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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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Intellect has nothing to do with equality except to respect it as a sublime convention.
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In teaching you cannot see the fruit of a day's work. It is invisible and remains so, maybe for twenty years.
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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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Simple English is no one’s mother tongue. It has to be worked for.
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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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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 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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Art distills sensation and embodies it with enhanced meaning in a memorable form - or else it is not art.
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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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An artist has every right - one may even say a duty - to exhibit his productions as prominently as he can.
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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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I have always been - I think any student of history almost inevitably is - a cheerful pessimist.
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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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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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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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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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Highly-adaptive, informal networks move diagonally and eliptically, skipping entire functions to get things done.
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To denounce does not free the self from what it hates, any more than ignoring the past shuts off its influence.
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