Whoever wants to know the heart and mind of America had better learn baseball, the rules and realities of the game — and do it by watching first some high school or small-town teams.
Jacques Barzun (1907-2012) French-American historian, educator, polymath
God’s Country and Mine, Part 2, ch. 8 (1954)
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Quotations by:
Barzun, Jacques
Many of us affect a tone of irony about gadgets, as if we lived always in realms above and dealt with trifles only during rare descents from sublime thoughts. The truth is that more and more of the important things in life turn on pinpoints. Our frustrations begin in trivialities — a telephone out of order, a car that will not start, a claim check whose number has been misread. The thing in cellophane that cannot be got at — plain to the sight but sealed like an egg — is the modern version of the torture of Tantalus. Catastrophes we will deal with like heroes, but the bottle top that defies us saps our morale, like the tiny arrows of the Lilliputians that maddened Gulliver and set his strength at naught.
Jacques Barzun (1907-2012) French-American historian, educator, polymath
God’s Country and Mine, Part 3, ch. 12 (1954)
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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.
Jacques Barzun (1907-2012) French-American historian, educator, polymath
Romanticism and the Modern Ego, ch. 1 (1943)
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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.
Jacques Barzun (1907-2012) French-American historian, educator, polymath
The Energies of Art: Studies of Authors Classic and Modern, “Whirligig: Last Words on Berlioz” (1956)
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Old age is like learning a new profession. And not one of your own choosing.
Jacques Barzun (1907-2012) French-American historian, educator, polymath
In Arthur Krystal, “Age of Reason,” The New Yorker (2007-10-15)
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