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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.

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
Alternative
Alternatives
Creates
Illusion
Perfection
Especially
Young
Disillusion
Always
Cynicism

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Schools are not intended to moralize a wicked world, but to impart knowledge and develop intelligence, with only two social aims in mind: prepare to take on one's share in the world's work, and perhaps in addition, lend a hand in improving society, after schooling is done.
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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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An artist has every right - one may even say a duty - to exhibit his productions as prominently as he can.
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Simple English is no one’s mother tongue. It has to be worked for.
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Time and rest are needed for absorption. Psychologists confirm that it is really in the summer that our muscles learn to skate and in the winter, how to swim.
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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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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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Science is, in the best and strictest sense, glorious entertainment
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The book, like the bicycle, is a perfect form.
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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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I have always been - I think any student of history almost inevitably is - a cheerful pessimist.
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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 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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The intellectuals' chief cause of anguish are one another's works.
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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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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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If civilization has risen from the Stone Age, it can rise again from the Wastepaper Age.
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Teaching is not a lost art, but the regard for it is a lost tradition.
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Great cultural changes begin in affectation and end in routine.
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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.
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