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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
Cause
Causes
Science
Another
Intellectuals
Anguish
Chief
Chiefs
Works

More quotes by Jacques Barzun

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I have always been - I think any student of history almost inevitably is - a cheerful pessimist.
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When people accept futility and the absurd as normal, the culture is decadent.
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Bad writing, it is easily verified, has never kept scholarship from being published.
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Life is given us as a passion.
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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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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 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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Teaching is not a lost art, but the regard for it is a lost tradition.
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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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By the time I was 9, I had the conviction that everybody in the world was an artist except plumbers or people who delivered groceries.
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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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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.
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The book, like the bicycle, is a perfect form.
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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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Highly-adaptive, informal networks move diagonally and eliptically, skipping entire functions to get things done.
Jacques Barzun
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Above all, do not talk yourself out of good ideas by trying to expound them at haphazard meetings.
Jacques Barzun
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Convince yourself that you are working in clay, not marble, on paper not eternal bronze: Let that first sentence be as stupid as it wishes.
Jacques Barzun
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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.
Jacques Barzun
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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.
Jacques Barzun
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Music is intended and designed for sentient beings that have hopes and purposes and emotions.
Jacques Barzun