Jacques Barzun

Always old-fashioned

— Jacques Barzun

Life is given us as a passion.

— Jacques Barzun

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

— Jacques Barzun

Universities incline wits to sophistry and affectation.

— Jacques Barzun

“First Principle: Have a point and make it by means of the best word.”

— Jacques Barzun

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

— Jacques Barzun

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

— Jacques Barzun

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

— Jacques Barzun

“[...] the state is not immoral but amoral; half of it exists outside morality”

— Jacques Barzun

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

— Jacques Barzun

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

— Jacques Barzun

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

— 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

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

— Jacques Barzun

Speech, after all, is in some measure an expression of character, and flexibility in its use is a good way to tell…

— Jacques Barzun

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

— Jacques Barzun

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

— Jacques Barzun

Science is an all-pervasive energy, for it is at once a mode of thought, a source of strong emotion, and a faith…

— Jacques Barzun

“Except among those whose education has been in the minimalist style, it is understood that hasty moral judgments about people in the…

— Jacques Barzun

The educated man had throughout the ages found a way to covert passionate activity into silent and motionless pleasure. He can sit…

— Jacques Barzun

Whoever wants to know the heart and mind of America had better learn baseball, the rules and realities of the game -…

— Jacques Barzun

“I submit that style, too, is an answer to a common want; but not so much to formulated problems as to felt…

— 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…

— Jacques Barzun

The reason why research is like sculpting from memory is that in neither is there a concrete visible subject to copy directly.…

— Jacques Barzun

The greatest artists have never been men of taste. By never sophisticating their instincts they have never lost the awareness of the…

— Jacques Barzun

Vanity is a static thing. It puts it faith in what it has, and is easily wounded. Pride is active, and satisfied…

— Jacques Barzun

In ordinary speech the words perception and sensation tend to be used interchangeably, but the psychologist distinguishes. Sensations are the items of…

— Jacques Barzun

Criticism will need an injection of humility that is, a recognition of its role as ancillary to the arts, needed only occasionally…

— Jacques Barzun

Seeing clearly within himself and always able to dodge around the ends of any position, including his own, Shaw assumed from the…

— Jacques Barzun

Shaw does not merely decorate a proposition, but makes his way from point to point through new and difficult territory. This explains…

— Jacques Barzun

“We hear them continually on TV: hence they occur first when it is our turn to talk. In this regard, talk may…

— Jacques Barzun

We are accustomed to the artist scoundrel or specialist in vice, and unaccustomed to the creator in whom passion and reason and…

— Jacques Barzun

Since in every European country between 1870 and 1914 there was a war party demanding armaments, an individualist party demanding ruthless competition,…

— 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…

— Jacques Barzun

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

— Jacques Barzun

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

— Jacques Barzun

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

— Jacques Barzun

Only a great mind that is overthrown yields tragedy

— Jacques Barzun

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

— Jacques Barzun

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

— Jacques Barzun