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Science is, in the best and strictest sense, glorious entertainment

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
Strictest
Glorious
Entertainment
Science
Sense
Best

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Bernard Shaw remains the only model we have of what the citizen of a democracy should be: an informed participant in all things we deem important to the society and the individual.
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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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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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When people accept futility and the absurd as normal, the culture is decadent.
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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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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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If civilization has risen from the Stone Age, it can rise again from the Wastepaper Age.
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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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Above all, do not talk yourself out of good ideas by trying to expound them at haphazard meetings.
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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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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
Jacques Barzun
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Finding oneself was a misnomer a self is not found but made.
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Only a great mind that is overthrown yields tragedy
Jacques Barzun
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The book, like the bicycle, is a perfect form.
Jacques Barzun
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You never step in the same river of thought twice, because neither you nor it are the same.
Jacques Barzun
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Time and rest are needed for absorption. Psychologists confirm that it is really in the summer that our muscles learn to skate and in the winter, how to swim.
Jacques Barzun
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The truth is, when all is said and done, one does not teach a subject, one teaches a student how to learn it.
Jacques Barzun
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Art distills sensation and embodies it with enhanced meaning in a memorable form - or else it is not art.
Jacques Barzun
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Simple English is no one’s mother tongue. It has to be worked for.
Jacques Barzun
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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