Jacques Barzun Short Quotes

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Great cultural changes begin in affectation and end in routine.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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
You are working in clay, not marble, on paper, not eternal bronze; let that first sentence be as stupid as it wishes.

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

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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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