Quotes by Jacques Barzun

• In any assembly the simplest way to stop transacting business and split the ranks is to appeal to a principal.
• 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.
• The test and the use of man's education is that he finds pleasure in the exercise of his mind.
• The intellectuals' chief cause of anguish are one another's works.
• The danger that may really threaten (crime fiction) is that soon there will be more writers than readers.
• Teaching is not a lost art, but the regard for it is a lost tradition.
• 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.
• Only a great mind that is overthrown yields tragedy.
• Of course, clothing fashions have always been impractical, except in Tahiti.
• Music is intended and designed for sentient beings that have hopes and purposes and emotions.
• In teaching you cannot see the fruit of a day's work. It is invisible and remains so, maybe for twenty years.
• 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.
• 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.
• If civilization has risen from the Stone Age, it can rise again from the Wastepaper Age.
• Idealism springs from deep feelings, but feelings are nothing without the formulated idea that keeps them whole.
• Great cultural changes begin in affectation and end in routine.
• An artist has every right - one may even say a duty - to exhibit his productions as prominently as he can.
• Art distills sensation and embodies it with enhanced meaning in a memorable form - or else it is not art.
• It seems a long time since the morning mail could be called correspondence.