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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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Jacques Barzun
Age: 104 †
Born: 1907
Born: November 30
Died: 2012
Died: October 25
Critic
Cultural Historian
Historian
Philosopher
University Teacher
Writer
Attention
Offering
Social
Explanation
Make
Factors
Thinking
Philosophical
Personality
Diverts
Intellectual
Implication
Mystery
Heredity
Race
Implications

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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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Music, not being made up of objects nor referring to objects, is intangible and ineffable it can only be as it were inhaled by the spirit: the rest is silence.
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Highly-adaptive, informal networks move diagonally and eliptically, skipping entire functions to get things done.
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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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Science is, in the best and strictest sense, glorious entertainment
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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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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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Baseball is a kind of collective chess with arms and legs in full play under sunlight.
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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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Of course, clothing fashions have always been impractical, except in Tahiti.
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When people accept futility and the absurd as normal, the culture is decadent.
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I have always been - I think any student of history almost inevitably is - a cheerful pessimist.
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The intellectuals' chief cause of anguish are one another's works.
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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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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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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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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 professionals resemble and recognize each other by virtue of the stigmata that their trade has left upon them. They are like the dog in the fable, whose collar has made an indelible mark around his neck. The amateur is the shaggy wolf whom no dog had better trust too far.
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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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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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