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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
Conventions
Sublime
Equality
Intellect
Except
Respect
Nothing
Convention

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Science is an all-pervasive energy, for it is at once a mode of thought, a source of strong emotion, and a faith as fanatical as any in history.
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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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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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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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To delve into history entails, besides the grievance of hard work, the danger that in the depths one may lose one’s scapegoats.
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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 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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Teaching is not a lost art, but the regard for it is a lost tradition.
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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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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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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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Of course, clothing fashions have always been impractical, except in Tahiti.
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On reflection, moral judgment in the arts appears rather as a tribute to their power to influence emotion and possibly conduct. And reflecting further on what some critics do today, one sees that a good many have merely shifted the ground of their moralism, transferring their impulse of righteousness to politics and social issues.
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To watch a football game is to be in a prolonged neurotic doubt as to what you're seeing. It's more like an emergency happening at a distance than a game. I don't wonder the spectators take to drink.
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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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Tennis belongs to the individualistic past - a hero, or at most a pair of friends or lovers, against the world.
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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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Science is, in the best and strictest sense, glorious entertainment
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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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When people accept futility and the absurd as normal, the culture is decadent.
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