A Quote by Jacques Barzun

The book, like the bicycle, is a perfect form.

Jacques Barzun

Quote Topics

Bicycle Book Form Like Perfect

Quote Author

Jacques Barzun
American - Educator
November 30, 1907 - October 25, 2012

I want to ride my bicycle bicycle bicycle; I want to ride my bicycle; I want to ride my bike; I want to ride my bicycle; I want to ride it where I like...; I don't believe in Peter Pan, Frankenstein or Superman; All I wanna do is bicycle, bicycle, bicycle...

Freddie Mercury

I believe there's a platonic ideal for every book that is written, like there's the perfect version of the book somewhere in the ether, and my job is to find what that book is through my editing.

Sheila Heti

Perfection is an unattainable goal. It isn't going to be perfect. Just get words down on paper, and when you stumble to what you think is the end of the book, you will have hundreds of pages of words that came out of your head. It may not be perfect, but it looks like a book.

Laurell K. Hamilton

Just as the ideal of classic Greek culture was the most perfect harmony of mind and body, so a human and a bicycle are the perfect synthesis of body and machine.

Richard Ballantine

Functionally, a man is somewhat like a bicycle. A bicycle maintains its poise and equilibrium only so long as it's moving forward towards something.

Maxwell Maltz

He will find one English book and one only, where, as in the "Iliad" itself, perfect plainness of speech is allied with perfect nobleness; and that book is the Bible.

Matthew Arnold

As a technology, the book is like a hammer. That is to say, it is perfect: a tool ideally suited to its task. Hammers can be tweaked and varied but will never go obsolete. Even when builders pound nails by the thousand with pneumatic nail guns, every household needs a hammer. Likewise, the bicycle is alive and well. It was invented in a world without automobiles, and for speed and range it was quickly surpassed by motorcycles and all kinds of powered scooters. But there is nothing quaint about bicycles. They outsell cars.

James Gleick

A human and a bicycle are the perfect synthesis of body and machine.

Richard Ballantine

A cult classic... both a celebration of the unlimited potential of the comic book form, and a perfect melding of inspiring, iconoclastic imaginations.

Jim Jarmusch

The Niagara on a bicycle. It's like trying to cross the Niagara on a bicycle, which is impossible, but it's an expression in the Dominican Republic that basically says that someone is going through a hard time.

Juan Luis Guerra

Susan B. Anthony said that the bicycle did more to emancipate women than any other single thing. The bicycle was linked in the psyches of women at that time as a symbol of practical emancipation. Women could go places, wear their skirts shorter to manage the bicycle, and be independent.

Susan Vreeland

Reading is sometimes thought of as a form of escapism, and it’s a common turn of phrase to speak of getting lost in a book. But a book can also be where one finds oneself; and when a reader is grasped and held by a book, reading does not feel like an escape from life so much as it feels like an urgent, crucial dimension of life itself.

Rebecca Mead

I find myself using music metaphors all the time, but this is too perfect, I feel like. Digital downloading is like photographs online. It's great, they're available, you can see lots of different work, but it's a limited experience of the form. A book is like an album. You don't have to have a million dollars to be able to buy it, you have to save some money, you have to buy your album, then you take it home, and you put it on your turntable.

Alec Soth

Perfect heroines, like perfect heroes, aren't relatable, and if you can't put yourself in the protagonist's shoes, not only will they not inspire you, but the book will be pretty boring.