Quotes by Jacques Barzun

Art distills sensation and embodies it with enhanced meaning in a memorable form - or else it is not art.
– Jacques Barzun
Great cultural changes begin in affectation and end in routine.
– Jacques Barzun
Idealism springs from deep feelings, but feelings are nothing without the formulated idea that keeps them whole.
– Jacques Barzun
In any assembly the simplest way to stop transacting business and split the ranks is to appeal to a principal.
– Jacques Barzun
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.
– Jacques Barzun
In teaching you cannot see the fruit of a day's work. It is invisible and remains so, maybe for twenty years.
– Jacques Barzun
It seems a long time since the morning mail could be called correspondence.
– Jacques Barzun
Music is intended and designed for sentient beings that have hopes and purposes and emotions.
– Jacques Barzun
Not even the visionary or mystical experience ever lasts very long. It is for art to capture that experience, to offer it to, in the case of literature, its readers; to be, for a secular, materialist culture, some sort of replacement for what the love of god offers in the world of faith.
– Jacques Barzun
Only a great mind that is overthrown yields tragedy.
– Jacques Barzun
Teaching is not a lost art, but the regard for it is a lost tradition.
– Jacques Barzun
The piano is the social instrument par excellence... drawing-room furniture, a sign of bourgeois prosperity, the most massive of the devices by which the young are tortured in the name of education and the grown-up in the name of entertainment.
– Jacques Barzun
The test and the use of man's education is that he finds pleasure in the exercise of his mind.
– 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.
– 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.
– Jacques Barzun
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.
– Jacques Barzun