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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
Illusion
Perfection
Especially
Young
Disillusion
Always
Cynicism
Alternative
Alternatives
Creates

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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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The intellectuals' chief cause of anguish are one another's works.
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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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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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For the educated, the authority of science rested on the strictness of its methods for the mass, it rested on the powers of explanation.
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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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Baseball is a kind of collective chess with arms and legs in full play under sunlight.
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Music is intended and designed for sentient beings that have hopes and purposes and emotions.
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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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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.
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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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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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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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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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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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Simple English is no one’s mother tongue. It has to be worked for.
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