Jacques Barzun Quotes

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

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

~ Jacques Barzun

Except among those whose education has been in the minimalist style, it is understood that hasty moral judgments about people in the past are a form of injustice.

~ Jacques Barzun

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

~ Jacques Barzun

What we ask of a writer in the first place is a unique voice. We ask for the rest later, and we may even pretend that it is only the later things we required -- no personal, individual, induplicable quality, just pure art.

~ Jacques Barzun

Whoever wants to know the hearts and minds of America had better learn baseball.

~ Jacques Barzun

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

~ Jacques Barzun

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

~ Jacques Barzun

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

~ Jacques Barzun

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

~ Jacques Barzun

Plain English - everybody loves it demands it - from the other fellow.

~ Jacques Barzun

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

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

~ Jacques Barzun

In teaching you cannot see the fruit of a day's work. It is invisible and remains so, maybe for twenty years.

~ Jacques Barzun

Music is intended and designed for sentient beings that have hopes and purposes and emotions.

~ Jacques Barzun

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

~ Jacques Barzun

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