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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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Jacques Barzun
Age: 104 †
Born: 1907
Born: November 30
Died: 2012
Died: October 25
Critic
Cultural Historian
Historian
Philosopher
University Teacher
Writer
Intellect
Except
Respect
Nothing
Convention
Conventions
Sublime
Equality

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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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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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Life is given us as a passion.
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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.
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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.
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Of course, clothing fashions have always been impractical, except in Tahiti.
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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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Art distills sensation and embodies it with enhanced meaning in a memorable form - or else it is not art.
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Great cultural changes begin in affectation and end in routine.
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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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Tennis belongs to the individualistic past - a hero, or at most a pair of friends or lovers, against the world.
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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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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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If civilization has risen from the Stone Age, it can rise again from the Wastepaper Age.
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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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Music is intended and designed for sentient beings that have hopes and purposes and emotions.
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Above all, do not talk yourself out of good ideas by trying to expound them at haphazard meetings.
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It is always some illusion that creates disillusion, especially in the young, for whom the only alternative to perfection is cynicism.
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You never step in the same river of thought twice, because neither you nor it are the same.
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Baseball is a kind of collective chess with arms and legs in full play under sunlight.
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