Quote

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.

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
Faith
Energy
History
Strong
Fanatical
Science
Pervasive
Thought
Mode
Source
Emotion

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Finding oneself was a misnomer a self is not found but made.
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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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Except among those whose education has been in the minimalist style, it is understood that hasty moral judgments about the past are a form of injustice.
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Life is given us as a passion.
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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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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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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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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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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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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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Only a great mind that is overthrown yields tragedy
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The intellectuals' chief cause of anguish are one another's works.
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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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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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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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Art distills sensation and embodies it with enhanced meaning in a memorable form - or else it is not art.
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Teaching is not a lost art, but the regard for it is a lost tradition.
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When people accept futility and the absurd as normal, the culture is decadent.
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