Barzun Quotes & Sayings

[The prince] dare not let ethics keep him from doing whatever evil must be done to preserve himself and the state. — Jacques Barzun

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

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

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 — Jacques Barzun

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

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

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. — Jacques Barzun

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. — Jacques Barzun

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

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. — Jacques Barzun

Writing, at least a craft and at its best an art, aspiring to the unique, is the most difficult to learn. — Jacques Barzun

The reason why research is like sculpting from memory is that in neither is there a concrete visible subject to copy directly. The subject - as sculptors themselves are fond of saying - is hidden in the block of material. — Jacques Barzun

The book, like the bicycle, is a perfect form. — Jacques Barzun

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

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

When all around take fundamental ideas for granted, these must be the truth. For most minds there is no comfort like it. — Jacques Barzun

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

It is not clear to anyone, least of all the practitioners, how science and technology in their headlong course do or should influence ethics and law, education and government, art and social philosophy, religion and the life of the affections. Yet 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. — Jacques Barzun

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

The French call mot juste the word that exactly fits. Why is this word so hard to find? The reasons are many. First, we don't always know what we mean and are too lazy too find out. — Jacques Barzun

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

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

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

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

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

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. — Jacques Barzun

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

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

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

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

The piano is the social instrument par excellence ... drawing-room furniture, a sign of bourgeois prosperity, the most massive of the devices by which the young are tortured in the name of education and the grown-up in the name of entertainment. — Jacques Barzun

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

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

The sole justification of teaching, of the school itself, is that the student comes out of it able to do something he could not do before. I say do and not know, because knowledge that doesn't lead to doing something new or doing something better is not knowledge at all. — Jacques Barzun

I would not be among you to-night (being awarded the 1964 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine) but for the mentors, colleagues and students who have guided and aided me throughout my scientific life. I wish I could name them all and tell you their contributions. More, however, than anyone else it was the late Rudolf Schoenheimer, a brilliant scholar and a man of infectious enthusiasm, who introduced me to the wonders of Biochemistry. Ever since, I have been happy to have chosen science as my career, and, to borrow a phrase of Jacques Barzun, have felt that 'Science is, in the best and strictest sense, glorious entertainment'. — Konrad Bloch

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

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 — Jacques Barzun

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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. — Jacques Barzun

Boredom and fatigue are great historical forces. — Jacques Barzun

The feeble clavichord did not carry far; the harpsichord was only a little stronger; but Cristofori in Italy was working at these defects; he built a machine he called clavicembalo piano e forte - a keyboard instrument to play "soft and loud." Contrary to all experience, we now call it simply "a soft. — Jacques Barzun

A student under my care owes his first allegiance to himself and not to my specialty; and must not be burdened with my work as if he followed no other and had contracted no obligation under heaven but that of satisfying my requirements. — Jacques Barzun

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

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

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

In fact any good mind properly taught can think like Euclid and like Walt Whitman. The Renaissance, as we saw, was full of such minds, equally competent as poet and as engineers. The modern notion of "the two cultures," incompatible under one skull, comes solely from the proliferation of specialties in science; but these also divide scientists into groups that do not understand one another, the cause being the sheer mass of detail and the diverse terminologies. In essence the human mind remains one, not 2 or 60 different organs. — Jacques Barzun

The nation in arms is virtually a communist state: the people must be paid wages and fed and protected and regimented behind the lines as much as on the front. Minds must be kept loyal and at the right pitch of hate, so that successive drafts of fighters are accepted without murmurings. Letters and newspapers must be censored while the propaganda mill grinds on. As for decisions of strategy and overall command, they must please many masters: dissenters in the cabinet, the heads of the allied states and public opinion. Hence failures must be disguised or concealed. — Jacques Barzun

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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. — Jacques Barzun

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

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

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. — Jacques Barzun

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

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. — Jacques Barzun

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

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

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

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

The root difficulty in all cases was the state of being blind and deaf to words
not seeing the words for the prose. Being adults, they had forgotten what every child understands, which is giving and taking a meaning is not automatic and inevitable — Jacques Barzun

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. — Jacques Barzun

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

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

Speech, after all, is in some measure an expression of character, and flexibility in its use is a good way to tell your friends from the robots. — Jacques Barzun

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

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

The motives behind scientism are culturally significant. They have been mixed, as usual: genuine curiosity in search of truth; the rage for certainty and for unity; and the snobbish desire to earn the label scientist when that became a high social and intellectual rank. But these efforts, even though vain, have not been without harm, to the inventors and to the world at large. The "findings" have inspired policies affecting daily life that were enforced with the same absolute assurance as earlier ones based on religion. At the same time, the workers in the realm of intuition, the gifted finessers - artists, moralists, philosophers, historians, political theorists, and theologians - were either diverted from their proper task, while others were looking on them with disdain as dabblers in the suburbs of Truth. — Jacques Barzun

Universities incline wits to sophistry and affectation. — Jacques Barzun

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

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? — Jacques Barzun

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

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. — Jacques Barzun

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

Only a great mind that is overthrown yields tragedy. — Jacques Barzun

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

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

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

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

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

One can hardly appreciate how academia has perverted its highest tasks and "ideals" without pondering long and hard the implications of Jacques Barzun's House of Intellect and its Hegelian/Bergsonian contrast between rigidified "intellect" and always-growing "intelligence." This fundamentally Hegelian distinction, needless to say, cuts to the quick of the contrast between Platonic and Aristotelian forms of philosophy. — Kenny Smith

[ ... ] the state is not immoral but amoral; half of it exists outside morality — Jacques Barzun

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

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

What we ask of a writer in the first place is a unique voice. We ask for the rest later, and we may even pretend that it is only the later things we required -- no personal, individual, induplicable quality, just pure art. — Jacques Barzun

No subject of study is more important than reading ... all other intellectual powers depend on it. — Jacques Barzun

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

Grab a pen and put down some words - your name even - and a title: something to see, to revise, to carve, to do over in the opposite way — Jacques Barzun

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