Jacques Barzun famous quotes

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

#Inspirational #Education #Teacher

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

#Hatred #Political #Tolerance

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

#Appreciation #Teacher #Educational

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

#Art #Philosophy #Real

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

#Music #Purpose #Emotion

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

#Education #Exercise #Men

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

#Civilization #Age #Stones

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

#Teacher #Doe #Done

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

#Fashion #Tahiti #Clothings

Of true knowledge at any time, a good part is merely convenient, necessary indeed to the worker, but not to an understanding of his subject: One can judge a building without knowing where to buy the bricks; one can understand a violin sonata without knowing how to score for the instrument. The work may in fact be better understood without a knowledge of the details of its manufacture, of attention to these tends to distract from meaning and effect.
-- Jacques Barzun

#Knowledge #Knowing #Judging

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

#Self #Made #Found

Great cultural changes begin in affectation and end in routine.
-- Jacques Barzun

#Fake People #Routine #Ends

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

#Mother #Simple #Tongue

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

#Philosophy #Men #Age

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

#Writing #Scholarship

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

#Running #Expression #Mind

Among the words that can be all things to all men, the word "race" has a fair claim to being the most common, most ambiguous and most explosive. No one today would deny that it is one of the great catchwords about which ink and blood are spilled in reckless quantities. Yet no agreement seems to exist about what race means.
-- Jacques Barzun

#Mean #Men #Race

Universities incline wits to sophistry and affectation.
-- Jacques Barzun

#Literature #Sophistry #Wit

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

#Mother #Creativity #Gestation

Regarding the idea of race, .. no agreement seems to exist about what race means. Race seems to embody a fact as simple and as obvious as the noonday sun, but if that is so, why the endless wrangling about the idea and the facts of race. What is a race? How can it be recognized? Who constitute the several races?.
-- Jacques Barzun

#Mean #Simple #Race

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

#Dog #Fables #Necks

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

#Creative #Shadow #West

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

#Baseball #Team #Heart

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

#School #Two #Hands

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

#Sleep #Fighting #Naps

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

#Thinking #Cheerful #Students

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

#Philosophical #Thinking #Race

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

#Complaining #Would Be #Elements

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

#Ideas #Advice #Trying

The history of creation is but a succession of battles between amateurs of genius-inspired heretics- and orthodox professionals.
-- Jacques Barzun

#Battle #Genius #Inspired

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

#Equality #Sublime #Conventions

We cannot appreciate the art of any age without first acquiring an equivalent of the experience it depicts.
-- Jacques Barzun

#Art #Appreciate #Age

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

#Perfection #Alternatives #Illusion

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

#Prejudice #Substance #Weapons

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

#Self #Loving You #Adults

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

#Men #Europe #Circles

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

#Artist #People #World

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

#Art #Men #Skills

We are accustomed to the artist scoundrel or specialist in vice, and unaccustomed to the creator in whom passion and reason and moral integrity hold in balance. But greatness of intellect and feeling, or soul and conduct magnanimity, in short does occur; it is not a myth for boy scouts, and its reality is important, if only to give us the true range of the term "human," which we so regularly define by its lower reaches.
-- Jacques Barzun

#Integrity #Passion #Artist

The eager or dutiful persons who subject themselves to these tidal waves of the classics and the moderns find everything wonderful in an absent-minded way. The wonder washes over them rather than into them, and one of its effects is to make anything shocking or odd suddenly interesting enough to gain a month's celebrity. And so another by-product of our come-one, come-all policy is the tendency to reward cleverness, not art, and to put one more hurdle in the path of the truly original artist.
-- Jacques Barzun

#Art #Interesting #Rewards

Baseball is a kind of collective chess with arms and legs in full play under sunlight.
-- Jacques Barzun

#Baseball #Play #Legs

A culture may be conceived as a network of beliefs and purposes in which any string in the net pulls and is pulled by the others,thus perpetually changing the configuration of the whole. If the cultural element called morals takes on a new shape, we must ask what other strings have pulled it out of line. It cannot be one solitary string, nor even the strings nearby, for the network is three-dimensional at least.
-- Jacques Barzun

#Three #Culture #Purpose

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

#Mind #Computer #Capacity

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

#Fall #Reading #Artist

Seeing clearly within himself and always able to dodge around the ends of any position, including his own, Shaw assumed from the start the dual role of prophet and gadfly. To his contemporaries it appeared frivolous and contradictory to perform as both superman and socialist, sceptic and believer, legalist and heretic, high-brow and mob-orator. But feeling the duty to teach as well as to mirror mankind, Shaw did not accept himself as a contradictory being.
-- Jacques Barzun

#Mirrors #Feelings #Roles

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

#Historical #Example #Details

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

#Summer #Winter #Swim

In ordinary speech the words perception and sensation tend to be used interchangeably, but the psychologist distinguishes. Sensations are the items of consciousness--a color, a weight, a texture--that we tend to think of as simple and single. Perceptions are complex affairs that embrace sensation together with other, associated or revived contents of the mind, including emotions.
-- Jacques Barzun

#Simple #Thinking #Color

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.
-- Jacques Barzun

#School #President #Sun

A person is not a democrat thanks to his ignorance of literature and the arts, nor an elitist because he or she has cultivated them. The possession of knowledge makes for unjust power over others only if used for that very purpose: a physician or lawyer or clergyman can exploit or humiliate others, or he can be a humanitarian and a benefactor. In any case, it is absurd to conjure up behind anybody who exploits his educated status the existence of an "elite" scheming to oppress the rest of us.
-- Jacques Barzun

#Art #Ignorance #Physicians

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.
-- Jacques Barzun

#Rights #Law #Practice

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.
-- Jacques Barzun

#Excellence #Calling #Praise

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

#Democracy #Important #Citizens

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

#Age #Profession #Old Age

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

#Faces #Surprise #Stranger

Shaw does not merely decorate a proposition, but makes his way from point to point through new and difficult territory. This explains why Shaw must either be taken whole or left alone. He must be disassembled and put together again with nothing left out, under pain of incomprehension; for his politics, his art, and his religion to say nothing of the shape of his sentences are unique expressions of this enormously enlarged and yet concentrated consciousness.
-- Jacques Barzun

#Art #Pain #Taken

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

#Social #Authority #Form

On the one hand, society needs a common faith and vigorous institutions with the power to coerce; and on the other, the individual as a human soul or as the bearer of a new and possibly saving heresy, must be free. It is difficult enough to reconcile these two needs, but the problem holds another hazard: the need of action under the pressure of time.
-- Jacques Barzun

#Hands #Two #Soul

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.
-- Jacques Barzun

#Art #Humility #Vocabulary

On reflection, moral judgment in the arts appears rather as a tribute to their power to influence emotion and possibly conduct. And reflecting further on what some critics do today, one sees that a good many have merely shifted the ground of their moralism, transferring their impulse of righteousness to politics and social issues.
-- Jacques Barzun

#Art #Reflection #Issues

Can an idea a notion as abstract as Relativism produce by itself the effects alleged? cause all the harm, destroy all the lives and reputations? I am as far as anyone can be from denying the power of ideas in history, but the suggestion that a philosophy (as Relativism is often called) has perverted millions and debased daily life is on the face of it absurd. No idea working alone has ever demoralized society, and there have been plenty of ideas simpler and more exciting than Relativism.
-- Jacques Barzun

#Philosophy #Ideas #Suggestions

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

#Authority #Mass #Method

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

#Science #Causes #Chiefs