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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.

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
Lack
Pose
Complete
Gentleness
Surprise
Report
Listen
Strangers
Seen
Reports
Face
Willingness
Faces
Consideration
Shaw
Stranger
Wont

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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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Education in the United States is a passion and a paradox. Millions want it, and commend it, and are busy about it. At the same time they degrade it by trying to get it free of charge and free of work.
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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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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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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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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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Finding oneself was a misnomer a self is not found but made.
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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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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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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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Teaching is not a lost art, but the regard for it is a lost tradition.
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History, like a vast river, propels logs, vegetation, rafts, and debris it is full of live and dead things, some destined for resurrection it mingles many waters and holds in solution invisible substances stolen from distant soils.
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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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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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Art distills sensation and embodies it with enhanced meaning in a memorable form - or else it is not art.
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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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The intellectuals' chief cause of anguish are one another's works.
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Great cultural changes begin in affectation and end in routine.
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I have always been - I think any student of history almost inevitably is - a cheerful pessimist.
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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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