Jacques Barzun Quotes - Page 2

Quotes about:

• 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

  Jacques Barzun (1961). “Classic, Romantic, and Modern”, p.14, University of Chicago Press

  11 Copy quote

• 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

  Education, Men, Silence

  4 Copy quote

• Maxims in times of danger are useless, experience is incommunicable. The knotted strands of life, desire, assumptions, and moral codes cannot be unsnarled; they can only be cut, which is what happens when an air raid occurs, with a silencing fortissimo like the finale of a Beethoven symphony.

  Jacques Barzun

  Cutting, Air, Symphony

  5 Copy quote

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

  Jacques Barzun

  Ideas, Advice, Trying

  4 Copy quote

• Bad writing, it is easily verified, has never kept scholarship from being published.

  Jacques Barzun

  Writing, Bad Writing, Scholarship

  9 Copy quote

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

  Jacques Barzun

  Mother, Simple, Tongue

  Jacques Barzun (1954). “Teacher in America”

  8 Copy quote

• 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

  16 Copy quote

• 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

  Writing, Race, Political

  7 Copy quote

• 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

  "Exeunt the Humanities". Essay by Jacques Barzun (1980) published in his book "The Culture We Deserve" (p. 117), 1989.

  7 Copy quote

• 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

  Jacques Barzun (1964). “Science: the glorious entertainment”

  8 Copy quote

• 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

  "A Stroll with William James". Book by Jacques Barzun, 1983.

  7 Copy quote

• 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

  Jacques Barzun's preface to the 3rd edition of his book "Berlioz and the Romantic Century", 1969.

  9 Copy quote

• 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

  7 Copy quote

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

  Jacques Barzun

  Self, Loving You, Adults

  Jacques Barzun (1959). “The House of Intellect”

  7 Copy quote

• 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

  Jacques Barzun (1954). “Teacher in America”

  5 Copy quote

• 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

  7 Copy quote

• 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

  "The Culture We Deserve" by Jacques Barzun, Wesleyan University Press, (p. 97), 1989.

  9 Copy quote

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

  Jacques Barzun

  Baseball, Play, Legs

  Quoted in Colin Jarman The Guinness Dictionary of Sports Quotations (1990).

  4 Copy quote

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

  Jacques Barzun

  Education, Children, Teaching

  Jacques Barzun (1954). “Teacher in America”

  5 Copy quote

• The ascetic is often a sensualist who has reached the limit of his capacity.

  Jacques Barzun

  Limits, Capacity

  4 Copy quote

• Highly-adaptive, informal networks move diagonally and eliptically, skipping entire functions to get things done.

  Jacques Barzun

  Moving, Done, Function

  4 Copy quote

• Science is, in the best and strictest sense, glorious entertainment

  Jacques Barzun

  Entertainment, Glorious

  8 Copy quote

• 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

  "The Energies of Art: Studies of Authors Classic and Modern" by Jacques Barzun, 1956.

  5 Copy quote

• 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

  Lines, May, Three

  Jacques Barzun (1989). “The Culture We Deserve”, p.89, Wesleyan University Press

  4 Copy quote

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

  Jacques Barzun

  Spring, Ideas, Feelings

  8 Copy quote

Page 2 of 5

First

← Prev

1

2

3

4

5

Next →

• facebook
• twitter
• googleplus
• email
• linkedin