Jacques Barzun Quotes (30 Quotes)

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.

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

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

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.

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.

Only a great mind that is overthrown yields tragedy.

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.

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.

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 h

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.

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

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

From Dawn to Decadence 500 Years of Western Cultural Life,

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.

Great cultural changes begin in affectation and end in routine.

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

The more a man cultivates the arts the less he fornicates. A more and more apparent cleavage occurs between the spirit and the brute.

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

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, the rules and realities of the game - and do it by watching first some high school or small-town teams.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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