Jacques Barzun
It seems a long time since the morning mail could be called correspondence.Collection: Morning
Music is intended and designed for sentient beings that have hopes and purposes and emotions.Collection: Music
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.Collection: Intelligence
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.
Political correctness does not legislate tolerance; it only organizes hatred.
An artist has every right - one may even say a duty - to exhibit his productions as prominently as he can.
The test and the use of man's education is that he finds pleasure in the exercise of his mind.
In teaching you cannot see the fruit of a day's work. It is invisible and remains so, maybe for twenty years.
Art distills sensation and embodies it with enhanced meaning in a memorable form - or else it is not art.
Whoever wants to know the heart and mind of America had better learn baseball.
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 the speechless real.
Great cultural changes begin in affectation and end in routine.
Teaching is not a lost art, but the regard for it is a lost tradition.
Idealism springs from deep feelings, but feelings are nothing without the formulated idea that keeps them whole.
Only a great mind that is overthrown yields tragedy.
In any assembly the simplest way to stop transacting business and split the ranks is to appeal to a principle.
The intellectuals' chief cause of anguish are one another's works.
Of course, clothing fashions have always been impractical, except in Tahiti.
If civilization has risen from the Stone Age, it can rise again from the Wastepaper Age.
The danger that may really threaten (crime fiction) is that soon there will be more writers than readers.
Since it is seldom clear whether intellectual activity denotes a superior mode of being or a vital deficiency, opinion swings between considering intellect a privilege and seeing it as a handicap.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Varese, Apollinaire, Ezra Pound, Leger, Gleizes, Severini, Villon, Duchamp, Duchamp-Villon, Marie Laurencin, Cocteau and many others were to me household names in the literal sense - names of familiar figures around the house.
I have always been - I think any student of history almost inevitably is - a cheerful pessimist.
I'll read, and then I'll take naps. When I feel sleep coming on, I give in and don't fight it.
When people accept futility and the absurd as normal, the culture is decadent.Collection: People
Finding oneself was a misnomer; a self is not found but made.Collection: Self
The truth is, when all is said and done, one does not teach a subject, one teaches a student how to learn it.Collection: Teacher
Old age is like learning a new profession. And not one of your own choosing.Collection: Age
The world has long observed that small acts of immorality, if repeated, will destroy character. It is equally manifest, though never said, that uttering nonsense and half-truth without cease ends by destroying IntellectCollection: Character
no subject of study is more important than reading…all other intellectual powers depend on it.Collection: Reading
Everybody keeps calling for Excellence - excellence not just in schooling, throughout society. But as soon as somebody or something stands out as Excellent, the other shout goes up: "Elitism!" And whatever produced that thing, whoever praises that result, is promptly put down. "Standing out" is undemocratic.Collection: Excellence
Boredom and fatigue are great historical forces.Collection: Boredom
Criticism will need an injection of humility that is, a recognition of its role as ancillary to the arts, needed only occasionally in a temporary capacity. Since the critic exists only for introducing and explaining, he must be readily intelligible; he has no special vocabulary: criticism is in no way a science or a system.Collection: Art
Education in the United States is a passion and a paradox. Millions want it, and commend it, and are busy about it. At the same time they degrade it by trying to get it free of charge and free of work.Collection: Passion
To delve into history entails, besides the grievance of hard work, the danger that in the depths one may lose one’s scapegoats.Collection: Hard Work
Since in every European country between 1870 and 1914 there was a war party demanding armaments, an individualist party demanding ruthless competition, an imperialist party demanding a free hand over backward peoples, a socialist party demanding the conquest of power and a racialist party demanding internal purges against aliens - all of them, when appeals to greed and glory failed, invoked Spencer and Darwin, which was to say science incarnate.Collection: Country
I can only think that the book is read because it deals with the difficulties of schooling, which do not change. Please note: the difficulties, not the problems. Problems are solved or disappear with the revolving times. Difficulities remain. It will always be difficult to teach well, to learn accurately; to read, write, and count readily and competently; to acquire a sense of history and start one's education or anothers.Collection: Book
Maxims in times of danger are useless, experience is incommunicable. The knotted strands of life, desire, assumptions, and moral codes cannot be unsnarled; they can only be cut, which is what happens when an air raid occurs, with a silencing fortissimo like the finale of a Beethoven symphony.Collection: Cutting
Let us face a pluralistic world in which there are no universal churches, no single remedy for all diseases, no one way to teach or write or sing, no magic diet, no world poets, and no chosen races, but only the wretched and wonderfully diversified human race.Collection: Writing
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 it can do, hence accustomed not to feel small stings.Collection: Pride
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.Collection: Mean
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.Collection: Heaven
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.Collection: Art
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.Collection: Faces
Above all, the ability to feel the force of an argument apart from the substance it deals with is the strongest weapon against prejudice.Collection: Prejudice