Quotes from Jacques Barzun

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.

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

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.

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

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.

Idealism springs from deep feelings, but feelings are nothing without the formulated idea that keeps them whole.

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.

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

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

Above all, the ability to feel the force of an argument apart from the substance it deals with is the strongest weapon against prejudice.

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

Writing, at least a craft and at its best an art, aspiring to the unique, is the most difficult to learn.

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

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

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

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.

In teaching you cannot see the fruit of a day's work. It is invisible and remains so, maybe for twenty years.

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

When plugged in, the least elaborate computer can be relied on to work to the fullest extent of its capacity. The greatest mind cannot be relied on for the simplest thing; its variability is its superiority.

Great cultural changes begin in affectation and end in routine

The ever-present impulse is to push against restriction and, in so doing, to feel intolerably hemmed in. Thus in practice, every liberation increases the sense of oppression. Nor is the paradox merely in the mind: the laws enacted to secure the rights of every person and group, by creating protective boundaries, create new barriers.

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

Only a great mind that is overthrown yields tragedy.

History, like a vast river, propels logs, vegetation, rafts, and debris; it is full of live and dead things, some destined for resurrection; it mingles many waters and holds in solution invisible substances stolen from distant soils.