Quotes from Jacques Barzun

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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 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

We cannot appreciate the art of any age without first acquiring an equivalent of the experience it depicts.

Vanity is a static thing. It puts it faith in what it has, and is easily wounded. Pride is active, and satisfied only with what it can do, hence accustomed not to feel small stings.

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