Jacques Barzun Quotes

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

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

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

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

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

"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."

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.

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

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

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 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.

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 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