Quotes from Jacques Barzun

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.

The educated man had throughout the ages found a way to covert passionate activity into silent and motionless pleasure. He can sit still in a room and not perish.

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.

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

In producers, loafing is productive; and no creator, of whatever magnitude, has ever been able to skip that stage, any more than a mother can skip gestation.

The one thing that unifies men in a given age is not their individual philosophies but the dominant problem that these philosophies are designed to solve.

Above all, do not talk yourself out of good ideas by trying to expound them at haphazard meetings.

Speech, after all, is in some measure an expression of character, and flexibility in its use is a good way to tell your friends from the robots.

I have always been - I think any student of history almost inevitably is - a cheerful pessimist.

The history of creation is but a succession of battles between amateurs of genius-inspired heretics- and orthodox professionals.

Universities incline wits to sophistry and affectation.

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.

Great cultural changes begin in affectation and end in routine.

Intellect has nothing to do with equality except to respect it as a sublime convention.

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

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.

For the educated, the authority of science rested on the strictness of its methods; for the mass, it rested on the powers of explanation.

Science is, in the best and strictest sense, glorious entertainment

The intellectuals' chief cause of anguish are one another's works.

Science is an all-pervasive energy, for it is at once a mode of thought, a source of strong emotion, and a faith as fanatical as any in history.

An artist has every right - one may even say a duty - to exhibit his productions as prominently as he can.

Bernard Shaw remains the only model we have of what the citizen of a democracy should be: an informed participant in all things we deem important to the society and the individual.

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 heart and mind of America had better learn baseball.