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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
Especially
Young
Disillusion
Always
Cynicism
Alternative
Alternatives
Creates
Illusion
Perfection

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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 greatest artists have never been men of taste. By never sophisticating their instincts they have never lost the awareness of the great simplicities, which they relish both from appetite and from the challenge these offer to skill in competition with popular art.
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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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Life is given us as a passion.
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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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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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Simple English is no one’s mother tongue. It has to be worked for.
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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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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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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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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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[T]hat is the triumph of history - truth absolute is not at hand the original with which to match the copy does not exist.
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Above all, the ability to feel the force of an argument apart from the substance it deals with is the strongest weapon against prejudice.
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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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Art distills sensation and embodies it with enhanced meaning in a memorable form - or else it is not art.
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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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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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Intellect has nothing to do with equality except to respect it as a sublime convention.
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The intellectuals' chief cause of anguish are one another's works.
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Democracy, to maintain itself, must repeatedly conquer every cell and corner of the nation. How many of our public institutions and private businesses, our schools, hospitals, and domestic hearths are in reality little fascist states where freedom of speech is more rigorously excluded than vermin?
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