Top 121 Quotes & Sayings by Jacques Barzun

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

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.

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

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

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

Whoever wants to know the heart and mind of America had better learn baseball.

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

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

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

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

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

Only a great mind that is overthrown yields tragedy.

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

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.

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

Great cultural changes begin in affectation and end in routine.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

Since in every European country between 1870 and 1914 there was a war party demanding armaments, an individualist party demanding ruthless competition, an imperialist party demanding a free hand over backward peoples, a socialist party demanding the conquest of power and a racialist party demanding internal purges against aliens - all of them, when appeals to greed and glory failed, invoked Spencer and Darwin, which was to say science incarnate.

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

The ever-present impulse is to push against restriction and, in so doing, to feel intolerably hemmed in. Thus in practice, every liberation increases the sense of oppression. Nor is the paradox merely in the mind: the laws enacted to secure the rights of every person and group, by creating protective boundaries, create new barriers.

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

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

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.

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

Highly-adaptive, informal networks move diagonally and eliptically, skipping entire functions to get things done.

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.

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.

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.

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

Criticism will need an injection of humility that is, a recognition of its role as ancillary to the arts, needed only occasionally in a temporary capacity. Since the critic exists only for introducing and explaining, he must be readily intelligible; he has no special vocabulary: criticism is in no way a science or a system.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

Everybody keeps calling for Excellence - excellence not just in schooling, throughout society. But as soon as somebody or something stands out as Excellent, the other shout goes up: "Elitism!" And whatever produced that thing, whoever praises that result, is promptly put down. "Standing out" is undemocratic.

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.

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

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

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.

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

I can only think that the book is read because it deals with the difficulties of schooling, which do not change. Please note: the difficulties, not the problems. Problems are solved or disappear with the revolving times. Difficulities remain. It will always be difficult to teach well, to learn accurately; to read, write, and count readily and competently; to acquire a sense of history and start one's education or anothers.

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