Jacques Barzun Quotes

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

Boredom and fatigue are great historical forces.

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

Above all, do not talk yourself out of good ideas by trying to expound them at haphazard meetings.

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.

Only a great mind that is overthrown yields tragedy

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

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.

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

Above all, the ability to feel the force of an argument apart from the substance it deals with is the strongest weapon against prejudice.

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

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

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.

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.

no subject of study is more important than reading…all other intellectual powers depend on it.

Intellect has nothing to do with equality except to respect it as a sublime convention.

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.

I once worked as a salesman and was very independent. I took orders from no one.

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

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

Machines are admirable and tyrannize only with the user's consent. Where, then, is the enemy? Not where the machine gives relief from drudgery but where human judgment abdicates. The smoothest machine-made product of the age is the organization man, for even the best organizing principle tends to corrupt, and the mechanical principle corrupts absolutely.

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

Life is given us as a passion.

In a large university, there are as many deans and executive heads as there are schools and departments. Their relations to one another are intricate and periodic; in fact, "galaxy" is too loose a term: it is a planetarium of deans with the President of the University as a central sun. One can see eclipses, inner systems, and oppositions.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

Art distills sensation and embodies it with enhanced meaning in a memorable form - or else it is not art.

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

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

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

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.

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

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?

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

I have always been - I think any student of history almost inevitably is - a cheerful pessimist.

One great aim of revision is to cut out. In the exuberance of composition it is natural to throw in - as one does in speaking - a number of small words that add nothing to meaning but keep up the flow and rhythm of thought. In writing, not only does this surplusage not add to meaning, it subtracts from it. Read and revise, reread and revise, keeping reading and revising until your text seems adequate to your thought.

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.

[T]hat is the triumph of history - truth absolute is not at hand; the original with which to match the copy does not exist.

The ascetic is often a sensualist who has reached the limit of his capacity.