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The intellectuals' chief cause of anguish are one another's works.

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
Works
Cause
Causes
Science
Another
Intellectuals
Anguish
Chief
Chiefs

More quotes by Jacques Barzun

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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.
Jacques Barzun
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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.
Jacques Barzun
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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.
Jacques Barzun
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I have always been - I think any student of history almost inevitably is - a cheerful pessimist.
Jacques Barzun
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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.
Jacques Barzun
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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
Jacques Barzun
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Only a great mind that is overthrown yields tragedy
Jacques Barzun
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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.
Jacques Barzun
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Finding oneself was a misnomer a self is not found but made.
Jacques Barzun
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Intellect has nothing to do with equality except to respect it as a sublime convention.
Jacques Barzun
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Art distills sensation and embodies it with enhanced meaning in a memorable form - or else it is not art.
Jacques Barzun
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Tennis belongs to the individualistic past - a hero, or at most a pair of friends or lovers, against the world.
Jacques Barzun
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Bernard Shaw remains the only model we have of what the citizen of a democracy should be: an informed participant in all things we deem important to the society and the individual.
Jacques Barzun
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Of course, clothing fashions have always been impractical, except in Tahiti.
Jacques Barzun
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In producers, loafing is productive and no creator, of whatever magnitude, has ever been able to skip that stage, any more than a mother can skip gestation.
Jacques Barzun
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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.
Jacques Barzun
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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.
Jacques Barzun
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Baseball is a kind of collective chess with arms and legs in full play under sunlight.
Jacques Barzun
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Simple English is no one’s mother tongue. It has to be worked for.
Jacques Barzun
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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.
Jacques Barzun