Jacques Barzun Quotes

91 quotes in 1260 categories

• Political correctness does not legislate tolerance; it only organizes hatred.
• Music is intended and designed for sentient beings that have hopes and purposes and emotions.
• Teaching is not a lost art, but the regard for it is a lost tradition.
• 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 teaching you cannot see the fruit of a day's work. It is invisible and remains so, maybe for twenty years.
• Whoever wants to know the heart and mind of America had better learn baseball, the rules and realities of the game - and do it…
• 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…
• An artist has every right - one may even say a duty - to exhibit his productions as prominently as he can.
• It seems a long time since the morning mail could be called correspondence.
• 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…
• 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…
• Vanity is a static thing. It puts it faith in what it has, and is easily wounded. Pride is active, and satisfied only with what…
• Idealism springs from deep feelings, but feelings are nothing without the formulated idea that keeps them whole.
• If civilization has risen from the Stone Age, it can rise again from the Wastepaper Age.
• Great cultural changes begin in affectation and end in routine.
• It is not clear to anyone, least of all the practitioners, how science and technology in their headlong course do or should influence ethics and…
• Of course, clothing fashions have always been impractical, except in Tahiti.
• Writing, at least a craft and at its best an art, aspiring to the unique, is the most difficult to learn.
• Grab a pen and put down some words - your name even - and a title: something to see, to revise, to carve, to do…
• The ascetic is often a sensualist who has reached the limit of his capacity.

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