Jacques Barzun Quotes

In any assembly the simplest way to stop transacting 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.

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

Convince yourself that you are working in clay, not marble, on paper not eternal bronze: Let that first sentence be as stupid as it wishes.

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

What we ask of a writer in the first place is a unique voice. We ask for the rest later, and we may even pretend that it is only the later things we required -- no personal, individual, induplicable quality, just pure art.

The root difficulty in all cases was the state of being blind and deaf to words-- not seeing the words for the prose. Being adults, they had forgotten what every child understands, which is giving and taking a meaning is not automatic and inevitable

The test and the use of man's education is that he finds pleasure in the exercise of his mind.

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

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

Bad writing, it is easily verified, has never kept scholarship from being published.

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

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

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