Jacques Barzun Quotes

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

Whoever wants to know the heart and mind of America had better learn baseball.

Political correctness does not legislate tolerance; it only organizes hatred.

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.

You never step in the same river of thought twice, because neither you nor it are the same.

no subject of study is more important than reading…all other intellectual powers depend on it.

It is a noteworthy feature of 20C culture that for the first time in over a thousand years its educated class is not expected to be at least bilingual.

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.

The French call mot juste the word that exactly fits. Why is this word so hard to find? The reasons are many. First, we don't always know what we mean and are too lazy too find out.

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.

The book, like the bicycle, is a perfect form.

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.

Simple English is no one’s mother tongue. It has to be worked for.

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

To delve into history entails, besides the grievance of hard work, the danger that in the depths one may lose one’s scapegoats.

The mind tends to run along the groove of one's intention and overlook the actual expression.

Old age is like learning a new profession. And not one of your own choosing.

First Principle: Have a point and make it by means of the best word.

[...] the state is not immoral but amoral; half of it exists outside morality

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.

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

If civilization has risen from the Stone Age, it can rise again from the Wastepaper Age.

In 1861, on the eve of the Civil War, Grant, aged thirty-nine, with four children at home and scarcely a penny in the bank, had made no mark on the world and looked unlikely to do so, for all the boom conditions of mid-century America. His Plymouth Rock ancestry, his specialist education, his military rank, which together must have ensured him a sheltered corner in the life of the Old World, counted for nothing in the New. He lacked the essential quality to be what Jacques Barzun has called a “booster,” one of those bustling, bonhomous, penny-counting, chance-grabbing optimists who, whether in the frenetic commercial activity of the Atlantic coast, in the emergent industries of New England and Pennsylvania or on the westward-moving frontier, were to make America’s fortune. Grant, in his introspective and undemonstrative style, was a gentleman, and was crippled by the quality.

[The prince] dare not let ethics keep him from doing whatever evil must be done to preserve himself and the state.

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

... in fact any good mind properly taught can think like Euclid and like Walt Whitman. The Renaissance, as we saw, was full of such minds, equally competent as poet and as engineers. The modern notion of "the two cultures," incompatible under one skull, comes solely from the proliferation of specialties in science; but these also divide scientists into groups that do not understand one another, the cause being the sheer mass of detail and the diverse terminologies. In essence the human mind remains one, not 2 or 60 different organs.

We are thus led to ask what the writer looks for and how he trains himself to look for it. The answer is: he makes himself habitually aware of words, positively self conscience of them about them, careful to follow what they might say and not to jump to what they might mean.

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

When all around take fundamental ideas for granted, these must be the truth. For most minds there is no comfort like it.

We are all bundles of wild and warrantless convictions, especially about one another, and when one gets an accidental glimpse of someone else's candid mind, the sight is dread-inspiring. For his cozy chamber of horrors - and particularly his facts - are owned and enjoyed in complete faith.

The feeble clavichord did not carry far; the harpsichord was only a little stronger; but Cristofori in Italy was working at these defects; he built a machine he called clavicembalo piano e forte — a keyboard instrument to play "soft and loud." Contrary to all experience, we now call it simply "a soft.

The motives behind scientism are culturally significant. They have been mixed, as usual: genuine curiosity in search of truth; the rage for certainty and for unity; and the snobbish desire to earn the label scientist when that became a high social and intellectual rank. But these efforts, even though vain, have not been without harm, to the inventors and to the world at large. The "findings" have inspired policies affecting daily life that were enforced with the same absolute assurance as earlier ones based on religion. At the same time, the workers in the realm of intuition, the gifted finessers - artists, moralists, philosophers, historians, political theorists, and theologians - were either diverted from their proper task, while others were looking on them with disdain as dabblers in the suburbs of Truth.

We hear them continually on TV: hence they occur first when it is our turn to talk. In this regard, talk may be said to be the enemy of writing. If you observe yourself when on the point of writing that the word rising spontaneously to your mind is not the hard, clear words of a lover of plain speech, but this mush of counterfeits and cliches.

...institutional self-reform is rare; the conscience is willing, but the culture is rough.

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.

I submit that style, too, is an answer to a common want; but not so much to formulated problems as to felt difficulties of an emotional kind. . . . Style is fundamentally a pose, a stance, at times a self delusion, by which the people of any period meet the particular dilemmas of their day.

I would not be among you to-night (being awarded the 1964 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine) but for the mentors, colleagues and students who have guided and aided me throughout my scientific life. I wish I could name them all and tell you their contributions. More, however, than anyone else it was the late Rudolf Schoenheimer, a brilliant scholar and a man of infectious enthusiasm, who introduced me to the wonders of Biochemistry. Ever since, I have been happy to have chosen science as my career, and, to borrow a phrase of Jacques Barzun, have felt that 'Science is, in the best and strictest sense, glorious entertainment'.

I quite understand how we are driven to lead statistical lives, but I repeat that it is the duty of art to make us imagine the particular; to make us understand that the rights of one human being are not a fraction of the rights of more than one, and at the same time that in any situation of collective evil, the suffering is felt by no more than one person; only one feels the bitter agony of injustice, only one dies

The beloved's features too were standardized in certain adjectives of color and shape and likened to natural objects, fruit and flowers especially. As a result, ingenuity in finding fresh ways to follow the pattern was required in addition to actual poetic powers. The challenge was great and it accounts for the quantity of verbal lovemaking in the blue, addressed to the remote or non-existent tribes of Celias and Delias.

Inquisition as such, that is, apart from methods and severity of results, has remained a live institution. The many dictatorships of the 20C have relied on it and in free countries it thrives ad hoc - Hunting down German sympathizers during the First World War, interning Japanese-Americans during the second, and pursuing Communist fellow-travelers during the Cold War. In the United States at the present time the workings of "political correctness" in universities and the speech police that punishes persons and corporations for words on certain topics quaintly called "sensitive" are manifestations of the permanent spirit of inquisition.

With so much knowledge written down and disseminated and so many ardent workers and eager patrons conspiring to produce the new, it was inevitable that technique and style should gradually turn from successful trial and error to foolproof recipe. The close study of antique remains, especially in architecture, turned these sources of inspiration into models to copy. The result was frigidity—or at best cool elegance. It is a cultural generality that going back to the past is most fruitful at the beginning, when the Idea and not the technique is the point of interest. As knowledge grows more exact, originality grows less; perfection increases as inspiration decreases. In painting, this downward curve of artistic intensity is called by the sug- gestive name of Mannerism. It is applicable at more than one moment in the history of the arts. The Mannerist is not to be despised, even though his high competence is secondhand, learned from others instead of worked out for himself. His art need not lack individual character, and to some connoisseurs it gives the pleasure of virtuosity, the exercise of power on demand, but for the critic it poses an enigma: why should the pleasure be greater when the power is in the making rather than on tap? There may be no answer, but a useful corollary is that perfection is not a necessary characteristic of the greatest art.

The dream begins with a teacher who believes in you, who tugs and pushes and leads you to the next plateau, sometimes poking you with a sharp stick called "truth." -Dan Rather In teaching you cannot see the fruit of a day's work. It is invisible and remains so, maybe for twenty years. -Jacques Barzun

Society hardly ever follows its blueprint, a fact that makes comparisons extremely difficult and judgments more than usually fallible.

When nothing is revered, irreverence ceases to indicate critical thought.

Strunk concluded his discussion of the mandate to omit needless words with this all-important qualifier: “This requires not that the writer make all sentences short or that he avoid all detail and treat subjects only in outline, but that every word tell.” Strunk’s concern is specifically with words and phrases that do not add propositions to the sentence, phrases like “the reason why is that” used in place of “because,” or “owing to the fact that” in place of “since.” It’s far easier to remember the term simple and direct as a summary of Jacques Barzun’s advice in his Simple & Direct: A Rhetoric for Writers than it is to remember that simple does not mean simplistic, direct does not mean short, and simple and direct does not mean that we should all write like Ernest Hemingway in a hurry.

Unfortunately, the combatants on both sides keep arguing whether the modern mind is harmed - some say victimized - by "too much reason," the attackers holding that science and numbers are not the only truth; the defenders retorting that if reason is given up, intellectual anarchy and wild superstition will reign. The latter are right about reason as an activity - reasoning; the former are right about Rationalism, the dominance of a particular form of reason and its encroachment where it does not belong.

What the world-wide Web did to the demotic character is hard to define. It made still more general the nerveless mode of existence – sitting and staring – and thus further isolated the individual. It enlarged the realm of abstraction; to command the virtual reduces the taste for the concrete. At the same time, the contents of the Internet were the same old items in multiplied confusion. That a user had ‘the whole world of knowledge at his disposal’ was one of those absurdities like the belief that ultimately computers would think – it will be time to say so when a computer makes an ironic answer. ‘The whole world of knowledge’ could be at one’s disposal only if one already knew a great deal and wanted further information to turn into knowledge after gauging its value. The Internet dispensed error and misinformation with the same impartiality as other data, the best transferred from books in libraries. The last 20C report on the working of the “world-wide web” was that its popularity was causing traffic jams on the roads to access and that the unregulated freedom to contribute to its words, numbers, ideas, pictures, and foolishness was creating chaos—in other words, duplicating the world in electronic form. The remaining advantage of the real world was that its contents were scattered over a wide territory and one need not be aware of more than one’s mind had room for.

The notion that talent and personality in women were suppressed at all times during our half millennium except the last fifty years is an illusion. Nor were all women previously denied an education or opportunities for self-development. Wealth and position were prerequisite, to be sure, and they still tend to be. The truth is that matters of freedom can never be settled in all-or-nothing fashion and any judgment must be comparative. Individual cases moreover show that what happens in a culture always differs in some degree from what is supposed to happen; possibilities are always greater than custom would dictate.

The Modern Era was to be one of plans and proposals, which is to say futurist to the point of bigotry.

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.

A curious leveling takes place: the common people learn words and ideas hitherto not familiar and not interesting and discuss them like intellectuals while others neglect their usual concerns - art, philosophy, scholarship - because there is only one compelling topic, the revolutionary Idea.

if one consults reason alone, one cannot assent to the articles of our faith" it was full of mysteries; "we are fools to try to explain them." This makes preaching Christianity not only a hard task but also dangerous. "Had I know, I should never have been a preacher.

Now, analysis, the breaking of the wholes into parts, is fundamental to science, but for judging works of art, the procedure is more uncertain: what are the natural parts of a story, a sonnet, a painting? The maker's aim is to project his vision by creating not a machine made up of parts but the impression of seamless unity that belongs to a living thing. Looking at an early example of systematic criticism by analysis -- say, Dante's comments on his sonnet sequence La Vita Nuova -- one sees that the best he can do is to tell again in prose what the first two lines mean, then the next three, and so on in little chunks through the entire work. We may understand somewhat better his intention here and there, but at the same time we vaguely feel that the exercise was superfluous and inappropriate. Reflection tells us why: those notations taken together do not add up to the meaning of the several poems. In three words: analysis is reductive. Since its patent success in natural sciences, analysis has become a universal mode of dealing not merely with what is unknown or difficult, but also with all interesting things as if they were difficult. Accordingly, analysis is a theme. Depending on the particulars of its effect, it can also be designated reductivism.