Jacques Barzun quotes - page 3

In teaching you cannot see the fruit of a day's work. It is invisible and remains so, maybe for twenty years. (Jacques Barzun)
It seems a long time since the morning mail could be called correspondence. View quote
Jacques Barzun
By the time I was 9, I had the conviction that everybody in the world was an artist except plumbers or people who delivered groceries. View quote
Jacques Barzun
Of course, clothing fashions have always been impractical, except in Tahiti. View quote
Jacques Barzun
In any assembly the simplest way to stop transacting business and split the ranks is to appeal to a principle. View quote
Jacques Barzun
Great cultural changes begin in affectation and end in routine. View quote
Jacques Barzun
I'll read, and then I'll take naps. When I feel sleep coming on, I give in and don't fight it. View quote
Jacques Barzun
Art distills sensation and embodies it with enhanced meaning in a memorable form - or else it is not art. View quote
Jacques Barzun
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. View quote
Jacques Barzun
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. View quote
Jacques Barzun
The test and the use of man's education is that he finds pleasure in the exercise of his mind. (Jacques Barzun)
Idealism springs from deep feelings, but feelings are nothing without the formulated idea that keeps them whole. View quote
Jacques Barzun
An artist has every right - one may even say a duty - to exhibit his productions as prominently as he can. 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. No one today would deny that it is one of the great catchwords about which ink and blood are spilled in reckless quantities. Yet no agreement seems to exist about what race means. View quote
Jacques Barzun
A student under my care owes his first allegiance to himself and not to my specialty; and must not be burdened with my work as if he followed no other and had contracted no obligation under heaven but that of satisfying my requirements. View quote
Jacques Barzun
The greatest artists have never been men of taste. By never sophisticating their instincts they have never lost the awareness of the great simplicities, which they relish both from appetite and from the challenge these offer to skill in competition with popular art. View quote
Jacques Barzun
Shaw does not merely decorate a proposition, but makes his way from point to point through new and difficult territory. This explains why Shaw must either be taken whole or left alone. He must be disassembled and put together again with nothing left out, under pain of incomprehension; for his politics, his art, and his religion - to say nothing of the shape of his sentences - are unique expressions of this enormously enlarged and yet concentrated consciousness. 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. To his contemporaries it appeared frivolous and contradictory to perform as both superman and socialist, sceptic and believer, legalist and heretic, high-brow and mob-orator. But feeling the duty to teach as well as to mirror mankind, Shaw did not accept himself as a contradictory being. View quote
Jacques Barzun
On the one hand, society needs a common faith and vigorous institutions with the power to coerce; and on the other, the individual as a human soul or as the bearer of a new and possibly saving heresy, must be free. It is difficult enough to reconcile these two needs, but the problem holds another hazard: the need of action under the pressure of time. View quote
Jacques Barzun
Can an idea - a notion as abstract as Relativism - produce by itself the effects alleged? cause all the harm, destroy all the lives and reputations? I am as far as anyone can be from denying the power of ideas in history, but the suggestion that a philosophy (as Relativism is often called) has perverted millions and debased daily life is on the face of it absurd. 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 ever-present impulse is to push against restriction and, in so doing, to feel intolerably hemmed in. Thus in practice, every liberation increases the sense of oppression. Nor is the paradox merely in the mind: the laws enacted to secure the rights of every person and group, by creating protective boundaries, create new barriers. (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. The possession of knowledge makes for unjust power over others only if used for that very purpose: a physician or lawyer or clergyman can exploit or humiliate others, or he can be a humanitarian and a benefactor. In any case, it is absurd to conjure up behind anybody who exploits his educated status the existence of an "elite" scheming to oppress the rest of us. View quote
Jacques Barzun
The eager or dutiful persons who subject themselves to these tidal waves of the classics and the moderns find everything wonderful in an absent-minded way. 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. And so another by-product of our come-one, come-all policy is the tendency to reward cleverness, not art, and to put one more hurdle in the path of the truly original artist. View quote
Jacques Barzun
The danger that may really threaten (crime fiction) is that soon there will be more writers than readers. View quote
Jacques Barzun
The intellectuals' chief cause of anguish are one another's works. View quote
Jacques Barzun