Quote

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.

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
Music
Inhaled
Made
Ineffable
Intangible
Referring
Objects
Silence
Rest
Spirit

More quotes by Jacques Barzun

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Convince yourself that you are working in clay, not marble, on paper not eternal bronze: Let that first sentence be as stupid as it wishes.
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If civilization has risen from the Stone Age, it can rise again from the Wastepaper Age.
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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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Baseball is a kind of collective chess with arms and legs in full play under sunlight.
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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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Intellect has nothing to do with equality except to respect it as a sublime convention.
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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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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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Old age is like learning a new profession. And not one of your own choosing.
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Let us face a pluralistic world in which there are no universal churches, no single remedy for all diseases, no one way to teach or write or sing, no magic diet, no world poets, and no chosen races, but only the wretched and wonderfully diversified human race.
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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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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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Life is given us as a passion.
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I have always been - I think any student of history almost inevitably is - a cheerful pessimist.
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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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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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Highly-adaptive, informal networks move diagonally and eliptically, skipping entire functions to get things done.
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When people accept futility and the absurd as normal, the culture is decadent.
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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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Of course, clothing fashions have always been impractical, except in Tahiti.
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