Quote

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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Jacques Barzun
Age: 104 †
Born: 1907
Born: November 30
Died: 2012
Died: October 25
Critic
Cultural Historian
Historian
Philosopher
University Teacher
Writer
Necessary
Anarchy
Ability
Invent
Natural
Complain
May
Element
Must
Complaining
Would
Agree
Elements
Amateurs
Exist
Amateur

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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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I'll read, and then I'll take naps. When I feel sleep coming on, I give in and don't fight it.
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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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The ever-present impulse is to push against restriction and, in so doing, to feel intolerably hemmed in. Thus in practice, every liberation increases the sense of oppression. Nor is the paradox merely in the mind: the laws enacted to secure the rights of every person and group, by creating protective boundaries, create new barriers.
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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 intellectuals' chief cause of anguish are one another's works.
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Baseball is a kind of collective chess with arms and legs in full play under sunlight.
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Tennis belongs to the individualistic past - a hero, or at most a pair of friends or lovers, against the world.
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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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Finding oneself was a misnomer a self is not found but made.
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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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When people accept futility and the absurd as normal, the culture is decadent.
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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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Only a great mind that is overthrown yields tragedy
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Highly-adaptive, informal networks move diagonally and eliptically, skipping entire functions to get things done.
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Intellect has nothing to do with equality except to respect it as a sublime convention.
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The book, like the bicycle, is a perfect form.
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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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Great cultural changes begin in affectation and end in routine.
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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
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