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Top Jacques Barzun Quotes

Browse top 42 most favorite famous quotes and sayings by Jacques Barzun.

Favorite Jacques Barzun Quotes

1. "You never step in the same river of thought twice, because neither you nor it are the same." ~ Jacques Barzun
2. "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
3. "no subject of study is more important than reading…all other intellectual powers depend on it." ~ Jacques Barzun
4. "The book, like the bicycle, is a perfect form." ~ Jacques Barzun
5. "Simple English is no one's mother tongue. It has to be worked for." ~ Jacques Barzun
6. "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
7. "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
8. "First Principle: Have a point and make it by means of the best word." ~ Jacques Barzun
9. "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
10. "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
11. "Idealism springs from deep feelings, but feelings are nothing without the formulated idea that keeps them whole." ~ Jacques Barzun
12. "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
13. "Art distills sensation and embodies it with enhanced meaning in a memorable form - or else it is not art." ~ Jacques Barzun
14. "If civilization has risen from the Stone Age, it can rise again from the Wastepaper Age." ~ Jacques Barzun
15. "It seems a long time since the morning mail could be called correspondence." ~ Jacques Barzun
16. "Of course, clothing fashions have always been impractical, except in Tahiti." ~ Jacques Barzun
17. "Only a great mind that is overthrown yields tragedy." ~ Jacques Barzun
18. "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
19. "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
20. "An artist has every right - one may even say a duty - to exhibit his productions as prominently as he can." ~ Jacques Barzun
21. "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
22. "Great cultural changes begin in affectation and end in routine." ~ Jacques Barzun
23. "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
24. "In any assembly the simplest way to stop transacting business and split the ranks is to appeal to a principle." ~ Jacques Barzun
25. "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
26. "The danger that may really threaten (crime fiction) is that soon there will be more writers than readers." ~ Jacques Barzun
27. "[...] the state is not immoral but amoral; half of it exists outside morality" ~ Jacques Barzun
28. "[The prince] dare not let ethics keep him from doing whatever evil must be done to preserve himself and the state." ~ Jacques Barzun
29. "... 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
30. "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
31. "The mind tends to run along the groove of one's intention and overlook the actual expression." ~ Jacques Barzun
32. "It is a noteworthy feature of 20C culture that for the first time in over a thousand years its educated class is not expected to be at least bilingual." ~ Jacques Barzun
33. "We are thus led to ask what the writer looks for and how he trains himself to look for it. The answer is: he makes himself habitually aware of words, positively self conscience of them about them, careful to follow what they might say and not to jump to what they might mean." ~ Jacques Barzun
34. "Bad writing, it is easily verified, has never kept scholarship from being published." ~ Jacques Barzun
35. "We hear them continually on TV: hence they occur first when it is our turn to talk. In this regard, talk may be said to be the enemy of writing. If you observe yourself when on the point of writing that the word rising spontaneously to your mind is not the hard, clear words of a lover of plain speech, but this mush of counterfeits and cliches." ~ Jacques Barzun
36. "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" ~ Jacques Barzun
37. "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
38. "Music is intended and designed for sentient beings that have hopes and purposes and emotions." ~ Jacques Barzun
39. "In teaching you cannot see the fruit of a day's work. It is invisible and remains so, maybe for twenty years." ~ Jacques Barzun
40. "Teaching is not a lost art, but the regard for it is a lost tradition." ~ Jacques Barzun
41. "The test and the use of man's education is that he finds pleasure in the exercise of his mind." ~ Jacques Barzun
42. "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

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Today's Quote

We are stripped of all that gave value and substance to our existence: power and love; in this naked final state, our last lover, our mate, death, comes. Bereft, without cover, we face the elements that will undo us. The winter breakers crash over and through us, flaunting their vigor and our nullity, as if the entire cosmos were now taking its ultimate revenge on the human creature who has lived too long: the dying sun mocks us from the west, for it will return tomorrow to die again, but we go down only once; the rising sun mocks us from the east, for we will not share in the rebirth of light and life; the noonday taunts us with its heat and vitality, for we are detritus; the north finally cloaks us in our last vestments: eternal night. That is how it ends."
Author: Arnold Weinstein

What Did Jacques Barzun Talk About?

Ten
Mind
Per
Act
Ear
Con
End
Mean
May
Ally
Sin
Word
Hey
Tell
Thou
Tea
Tan
Self
She
Lit
State
Hen
Wit
Words
Use
Tie
Teach
Thin
Tend
Side
Artist
Call
Chin
Each
Cat
Here
King
Los
Moral
Ours
Read
Ape

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