Jacques Barzun Quotes

The book, like the bicycle, is a perfect form.

[T]hat is the triumph of history - truth absolute is not at hand; the original with which to match the copy does not exist.

Take a portion of wit, And fashion it fit, Like a needle, with point and with eye: A point that can wound, An eye to look round, And at folly or vice let it fly

After being boxed in by man and his constructions in Europe and the East, the release into space is exhilarating. The horizon is a huge remote circle, and no hills intervene.

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

Above all, the ability to feel the force of an argument apart from the substance it deals with is the strongest weapon against prejudice.

To denounce does not free the self from what it hates, any more than ignoring the past shuts off its influence.

It is only in the shadows, when some fresh wave, truly original, truly creative, breaks upon the shore, that there will be a rediscovery of the West.

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

Grab a pen and put down some words - your name even - and a title: something to see, to revise, to carve, to do over in the opposite way

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

no subject of study is more important than reading…all other intellectual powers depend on it.

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

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.

Speech, after all, is in some measure an expression of character, and flexibility in its use is a good way to tell your friends from the robots.

Life is given us as a passion.

Writing, at least a craft and at its best an art, aspiring to the unique, is the most difficult to learn.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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