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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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Jacques Barzun
Age: 104 †
Born: 1907
Born: November 30
Died: 2012
Died: October 25
Critic
Cultural Historian
Historian
Philosopher
University Teacher
Writer
Advice
Talk
Ideas
Trying
Good
Expound
Haphazard
Meetings

More quotes by Jacques Barzun

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Science is, in the best and strictest sense, glorious entertainment
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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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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.
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The book, like the bicycle, is a perfect form.
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I have always been - I think any student of history almost inevitably is - a cheerful pessimist.
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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.
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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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 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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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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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.
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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.
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After being boxed in by man and his constructions in Europe and the East, the release into space is exhilarating. The horizon is a huge remote circle, and no hills intervene.
Jacques Barzun
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The intellectuals' chief cause of anguish are one another's works.
Jacques Barzun
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An artist has every right - one may even say a duty - to exhibit his productions as prominently as he can.
Jacques Barzun
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Like Rousseau, whom he resembles even more than he resembles Voltaire, Shaw never gave a social form to his assertiveness, never desired to arrive and to assimilate himself, or wield authority as of right.
Jacques Barzun
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Of course, clothing fashions have always been impractical, except in Tahiti.
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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Baseball is a kind of collective chess with arms and legs in full play under sunlight.
Jacques Barzun
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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.
Jacques Barzun