Quotes from Jacques Barzun

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.

Music is intended and designed for sentient beings that have hopes and purposes and emotions.

Time and rest are needed for absorption. Psychologists confirm that it is really in the summer that our muscles learn to skate and in the winter, how to swim.

It seems a long time since the morning mail could be called correspondence.

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.

Life is given us as a passion.

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

Of course, clothing fashions have always been impractical, except in Tahiti.

The danger that may really threaten (crime fiction) is that soon there will be more writers than readers.

The truth is, when all is said and done, one does not teach a subject, one teaches a student how to learn it.

[T]hat is the triumph of history - truth absolute is not at hand; the original with which to match the copy does not exist.

Only a great mind that is overthrown yields tragedy.

I'll read, and then I'll take naps. When I feel sleep coming on, I give in and don't fight it.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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