Jacques Barzun Quotes

Of course, clothing fashions have always been impractical, except in Tahiti.

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.

The danger that may really threaten (crime fiction) is that soon there will be more writers than readers

Political correctness does not legislate tolerance; it only organizes hatred.

Teaching is not a lost art, but the regard for it is a lost tradition.

In teaching you cannot see the fruit of a day's work. It is invisible and remains so, maybe for twenty years.

The truth is, when all is said and done, one does not teach a subject, one teaches a student how to learn it.

If civilization has risen from the Stone Age, it can rise again from the Wastepaper Age.

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.

Universities incline wits to sophistry and affectation.

The test and the use of man's education is that he finds pleasure in the exercise of his mind.

Music is intended and designed for sentient beings that have hopes and purposes and emotions.

Finding oneself was a misnomer; a self is not found but made.

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.

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.

It seems a long time since the morning mail could be called correspondence.

Bad writing, it is easily verified, has never kept scholarship from being published.

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

Great cultural changes begin in affectation and end in routine.

The mind tends to run along the groove of one's intention and overlook the actual expression.

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.

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.

In any assembly the simplest way to stop transacting business and split the ranks is to appeal to a principle.

Simple English is no one’s mother tongue. It has to be worked for.

For the educated, the authority of science rested on the strictness of its methods; for the mass, it rested on the powers of explanation.

Idealism springs from deep feelings, but feelings are nothing without the formulated idea that keeps them whole.

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

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.

The intellectuals' chief cause of anguish are one another's works.

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.

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.

Only a great mind that is overthrown yields tragedy

Tennis belongs to the individualistic past - a hero, or at most a pair of friends or lovers, against the world.

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.

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.

To delve into history entails, besides the grievance of hard work, the danger that in the depths one may lose one’s scapegoats.

Americans began by loving youth, and now, out of adult self-pity, they worship it.

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.

Boredom and fatigue are great historical forces.

I'll read, and then I'll take naps. When I feel sleep coming on, I give in and don't fight it.

The reason teaching has to go on is that children are not born human; they are made so.

When people accept futility and the absurd as normal, the culture is decadent.

Old age is like learning a new profession. And not one of your own choosing.

No one has ever used historical examples, near or remote, with the detail, precision, and directness to be found in every page of Shaw.

It is always some illusion that creates disillusion, especially in the young, for whom the only alternative to perfection is cynicism.

Science is an all-pervasive energy, for it is at once a mode of thought, a source of strong emotion, and a faith as fanatical as any in history.

Look for all fancy wordings and get rid of themAvoid all terms and expressions, old or new, that embody affectation.

You never step in the same river of thought twice, because neither you nor it are the same.

An artist has every right - one may even say a duty - to exhibit his productions as prominently as he can.

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.