Top 99 Jacques Barzun Quotes
#1. 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.
Jacques Barzun
#2. 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?
Jacques Barzun
#3. No subject of study is more important than reading ... all other intellectual powers depend on it.
Jacques Barzun
#4. 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
#5. Baseball is a kind of collective chess with arms and legs in full play under sunlight.
Jacques Barzun
#6. The danger that may really threaten (crime fiction) is that soon there will be more writers than readers.
Jacques Barzun
#7. Teaching is not a lost art, but the regard for it is a lost tradition.
Jacques Barzun
#8. First Principle: Have a point and make it by means of the best word.
Jacques Barzun
#9. 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
#10. Highly-adaptive, informal networks move diagonally and eliptically, skipping entire functions to get things done.
Jacques Barzun
#11. Like Rousseau, whom he resembles even more than he resembles Voltaire , Shaw never gave a social form to his assertiveness, never desired to arrive and to assimilate himself, or wield authority as of right.
Jacques Barzun
#12. For the educated, the authority of science rested on the strictness of its methods; for the mass, it rested on the powers of explanation.
Jacques Barzun
#14. When people accept futility and the absurd as normal, the culture is decadent.
Jacques Barzun
#15. To denounce does not free the self from what it hates, any more than ignoring the past shuts off its influence.
Jacques Barzun
#16. It seems a long time since the morning mail could be called correspondence.
Jacques Barzun
#17. Speech, after all, is in some measure an expression of character, and flexibility in its use is a good way to tell your friends from the robots.
Jacques Barzun
#18. 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.
Jacques Barzun
#19. In any assembly the simplest way to stop transacting business and split the ranks is to appeal to a principle.
Jacques Barzun
#20. 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.
Jacques Barzun
#21. If it were possible to talk to the unborn, one could never explain to them how it feels to be alive, for life is washed in the speechless real.
Jacques Barzun
#22. I have always been - I think any student of history almost inevitably is - a cheerful pessimist.
Jacques Barzun
#23. Since it is seldom clear whether intellectual activity denotes a superior mode of being or a vital deficiency, opinion swings between considering intellect a privilege and seeing it as a handicap
Jacques Barzun
#24. Music is intended and designed for sentient beings that have hopes and purposes and emotions.
Jacques Barzun
#25. 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.
Jacques Barzun
#26. 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
#27. The French call mot juste the word that exactly fits. Why is this word so hard to find? The reasons are many. First, we don't always know what we mean and are too lazy too find out.
Jacques Barzun
#28. Bad writing, it is easily verified, has never kept scholarship from being published.
Jacques Barzun
#29. We are thus led to ask what the writer looks for and how he trains himself to look for it. The answer is: he makes himself habitually aware of words, positively self conscience of them about them, careful to follow what they might say and not to jump to what they might mean.
Jacques Barzun
#30. Only a great mind that is overthrown yields tragedy.
Jacques Barzun
#31. If civilization has risen from the Stone Age, it can rise again from the Wastepaper Age.
Jacques Barzun
#32. The test and the use of man's education is that he finds pleasure in the exercise of his mind.
Jacques Barzun
#33. Grab a pen and put down some words - your name even - and a title: something to see, to revise, to carve, to do over in the opposite way
Jacques Barzun
#34. A man who has both feet planted firmly in the air can be safely called a liberal as opposed to the conservative, who has both feet firmly planted in his mouth.
Jacques Barzun
#35. No one has ever used historical examples, near or remote, with the detail, precision, and directness to be found in every page of Shaw.
Jacques Barzun
#36. [ ... ] the state is not immoral but amoral; half of it exists outside morality
Jacques Barzun
#37. The history of creation is but a succession of battles between amateurs of genius-inspired heretics- and orthodox professionals.
Jacques Barzun
#38. It is only in the shadows, when some fresh wave, truly original, truly creative, breaks upon the shore, that there will be a rediscovery of the West.
Jacques Barzun
#39. 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
#40. The ascetic is often a sensualist who has reached the limit of his capacity.
Jacques Barzun
#41. Old age is like learning a new profession. And not one of your own choosing.
Jacques Barzun
#42. The sole justification of teaching, of the school itself, is that the student comes out of it able to do something he could not do before. I say do and not know, because knowledge that doesn't lead to doing something new or doing something better is not knowledge at all.
Jacques Barzun
#43. 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.
Jacques Barzun
#44. We cannot appreciate the art of any age without first acquiring an equivalent of the experience it depicts.
Jacques Barzun
#45. What we ask of a writer in the first place is a unique voice. We ask for the rest later, and we may even pretend that it is only the later things we required -- no personal, individual, induplicable quality, just pure art.
Jacques Barzun
#46. Political correctness does not legislate tolerance; it only organizes hatred.
Jacques Barzun
#47. The reason why research is like sculpting from memory is that in neither is there a concrete visible subject to copy directly. The subject - as sculptors themselves are fond of saying - is hidden in the block of material.
Jacques Barzun
#48. 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
#49. 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.
Jacques Barzun
#50. When all around take fundamental ideas for granted, these must be the truth. For most minds there is no comfort like it.
Jacques Barzun
#51. Except among those whose education has been in the minimalist style, it is understood that hasty moral judgments about people in the past are a form of injustice.
Jacques Barzun
#52. 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
#53. In teaching you cannot see the fruit of a day's work. It is invisible and remains so, maybe for twenty years.
Jacques Barzun
#54. Above all, do not talk yourself out of good ideas by trying to expound them at haphazard meetings.
Jacques Barzun
#55. Great cultural changes begin in affectation and end in routine.
Jacques Barzun
#56. Writing, at least a craft and at its best an art, aspiring to the unique, is the most difficult to learn.
Jacques Barzun
#57. My notion about any artist is that we honor him best by reading him, by playing his music, by seeing his plays or by looking at his pictures. We don't need to fall all over ourselves with adjectives and epithets. Let's play him more.
Jacques Barzun
#58. Vanity is a static thing. It puts it faith in what it has, and is easily wounded. Pride is active, and satisfied only with what it can do, hence accustomed not to feel small stings.
Jacques Barzun
#59. Americans began by loving youth, and now, out of adult self-pity, they worship it.
Jacques Barzun
#60. Simple English is no one's mother tongue. It has to be worked for.
Jacques Barzun
#61. [The prince] dare not let ethics keep him from doing whatever evil must be done to preserve himself and the state.
Jacques Barzun
#62. Universities incline wits to sophistry and affectation.
Jacques Barzun
#63. An artist has every right - one may even say a duty - to exhibit his productions as prominently as he can.
Jacques Barzun
#64. Tennis belongs to the individualistic past - a hero, or at most a pair of friends or lovers, against the world.
Jacques Barzun
#65. The root difficulty in all cases was the state of being blind and deaf to words
not seeing the words for the prose. Being adults, they had forgotten what every child understands, which is giving and taking a meaning is not automatic and inevitable
Jacques Barzun
#66. Maxims in times of danger are useless, experience is incommunicable. The knotted strands of life, desire, assumptions, and moral codes cannot be unsnarled; they can only be cut, which is what happens when an air raid occurs, with a silencing fortissimo like the finale of a Beethoven symphony.
Jacques Barzun
#67. 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.
Jacques Barzun
#68. A student under my care owes his first allegiance to himself and not to my specialty; and must not be burdened with my work as if he followed no other and had contracted no obligation under heaven but that of satisfying my requirements.
Jacques Barzun
#69. When plugged in, the least elaborate computer can be relied on to work to the fullest extent of its capacity. The greatest mind cannot be relied on for the simplest thing; its variability is its superiority.
Jacques Barzun
#71. Varese, Apollinaire, Ezra Pound, Leger, Gleizes, Severini, Villon, Duchamp, Duchamp-Villon, Marie Laurencin, Cocteau and many others were to me household names in the literal sense - names of familiar figures around the house.
Jacques Barzun
#72. 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.
Jacques Barzun
#73. 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
#74. 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.
Jacques Barzun
#75. I'll read, and then I'll take naps. When I feel sleep coming on, I give in and don't fight it.
Jacques Barzun
#76. Art distills sensation and embodies it with enhanced meaning in a memorable form - or else it is not art.
Jacques Barzun
#77. The intellectuals' chief cause of anguish are one another's works.
Jacques Barzun
#78. The professionals resemble and recognize each other by virtue of the stigmata that their trade has left upon them. They are like the dog in the fable, whose collar has made an indelible mark around his neck. The amateur is the shaggy wolf whom no dog had better trust too far.
Jacques Barzun
#79. Look for all fancy wordings and get rid of themAvoid all terms and expressions, old or new, that embody affectation.
Jacques Barzun
#80. 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.
Jacques Barzun
#81. You never step in the same river of thought twice, because neither you nor it are the same.
Jacques Barzun
#82. Intellect has nothing to do with equality except to respect it as a sublime convention.
Jacques Barzun
#83. 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.
Jacques Barzun
#84. 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.
Jacques Barzun
#85. Above all, the ability to feel the force of an argument apart from the substance it deals with is the strongest weapon against prejudice.
Jacques Barzun
#86. Finding oneself was a misnomer; a self is not found but made.
Jacques Barzun
#87. 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
#88. The world has long observed that small acts of immorality, if repeated, will destroy character. It is equally manifest, though never said, that uttering nonsense and half-truth without cease ends by destroying Intellect
Jacques Barzun
#90. It is always some illusion that creates disillusion, especially in the young, for whom the only alternative to perfection is cynicism.
Jacques Barzun
#91. It is a noteworthy feature of 20C culture that for the first time in over a thousand years its educated class is not expected to be at least bilingual.
Jacques Barzun
#92. 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.
Jacques Barzun
#93. [T]hat is the triumph of history - truth absolute is not at hand; the original with which to match the copy does not exist.
Jacques Barzun
#94. 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.
Jacques Barzun
#95. The mind tends to run along the groove of one's intention and overlook the actual expression.
Jacques Barzun
#96. The reason teaching has to go on is that children are not born human; they are made so.
Jacques Barzun
#97. To delve into history entails, besides the grievance of hard work, the danger that in the depths one may lose one's scapegoats.
Jacques Barzun
#98. Of course, clothing fashions have always been impractical, except in Tahiti.
Jacques Barzun
#99. Idealism springs from deep feelings, but feelings are nothing without the formulated idea that keeps them whole.
Jacques Barzun
Famous Authors
Popular Topics
Scroll to Top
