Jacques Barzun quotes - page 2

Shaw's emotional development was one with his intellectual strength. (Jacques Barzun)
That his action has not been in vain, we can measure by how little Shaw's iconoclasm stirs our blood; we no longer remember what he destroyed that was blocking our view. View quote
Jacques Barzun
If civilization has risen from the Stone Age, it can rise again from the Wastepaper Age. View quote
Jacques Barzun
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 injustice. View quote
Jacques Barzun
A man who has both feet planted firmly in the air can be safely called a liberal as opposed to the conservative, who has both feet firmly planted in his mouth. View quote
Jacques Barzun
It defaces every type of mental activity - history, art, politics, science and social reform. View quote
Jacques Barzun
No idea working alone has ever demoralized society, and there have been plenty of ideas simpler and more exciting than Relativism. View quote
Jacques Barzun
The need for a body of common knowledge and common reference does not disappear when a society is pluralistic. On the contrary, it grows more necessary, so that people of different origins and occupation may quickly find familiar ground and as we say, speak a common language. View quote
Jacques Barzun
Great works of art are great by virtue of being syntheses of the world; they qualify as art by fusing form and contents into an indivisible whole; what they offer is not "discourse about," nor a cipher to be decoded, but a prolonged incitement to finesse. View quote
Jacques Barzun
The wonder washes over them rather than into them, and one of its effects is to make anything shocking or odd suddenly interesting enough to gain a month's celebrity. View quote
Jacques Barzun
It is difficult enough to reconcile these two needs, but the problem holds another hazard: the need of action under the pressure of time. (Jacques Barzun)
Shaw knows at any moment, on any subject, what he thinks, what you will think, what others have thought, what all this thinking entails; and he takes the most elaborate pains to bring these thoughts to light in a form which is by turns abstract and familiar, conciliatory and aggressive, obvious and inferential, comic and puzzling. View quote
Jacques Barzun
The greatest artists have never been men of taste. View quote
Jacques Barzun
Among the words that can be all things to all men, the word "race" has a fair claim to being the most common, most ambiguous and most explosive. View quote
Jacques Barzun
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. View quote
Jacques Barzun
Seeing clearly within himself and always able to dodge around the ends of any position, including his own, Shaw assumed from the start the dual role of prophet and gadfly. View quote
Jacques Barzun
Culture, humaneness, spiritual grace, are not forced upon us by logic: they either are self-evident or pointless. View quote
Jacques Barzun
The ever-present impulse is to push against restriction and, in so doing, to feel intolerably hemmed in. View quote
Jacques Barzun
The truth is that more and more of the important things in life turn on pinpoints. View quote
Jacques Barzun
Shaw does not merely decorate a proposition, but makes his way from point to point through new and difficult territory. View quote
Jacques Barzun
He never invested his whole moral capital in a man, a book, or a cause, but treasured up wisdom wherever it could be picked up, always with scrupulous acknowledgment. (Jacques Barzun)
Philosophers no longer write for the intelligent, only for their fellow professionals. View quote
Jacques Barzun
But this nationalism differs from the old in two remarkable ways: it is not patriotic and it does not want to absorb and assimilate. On the contrary, it wants to shrink and secede, to limit its control to its one small group of like-minded-we-ourselves-alone. It is in that sense racist, particularist, sectarian, minority-inspired. View quote
Jacques Barzun
To say this is also to say that the age of ready reference is one in which knowledge inevitably declines into information. The master of so much packaged stuff has less need to grasp context or meaning than his forbears: he can always look it up. View quote
Jacques Barzun
A student under my care owes his first allegiance to himself and not to my specialty. View quote
Jacques Barzun