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Baseball is a kind of collective chess with arms and legs in full play under sunlight.

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
Play
Collectives
Kind
Sunlight
Collective
Chess
Legs
Baseball
Arms
Full

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You never step in the same river of thought twice, because neither you nor it are the same.
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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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Take a portion of wit, And fashion it fit, Like a needle, with point and with eye: A point that can wound, An eye to look round, And at folly or vice let it fly
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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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Simple English is no one’s mother tongue. It has to be worked for.
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Highly-adaptive, informal networks move diagonally and eliptically, skipping entire functions to get things done.
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Old age is like learning a new profession. And not one of your own choosing.
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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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The intellectuals' chief cause of anguish are one another's works.
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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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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 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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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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Art distills sensation and embodies it with enhanced meaning in a memorable form - or else it is not art.
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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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Of course, clothing fashions have always been impractical, except in Tahiti.
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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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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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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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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