Words matter. These are the best Jacques Barzun Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
Idealism springs from deep feelings, but feelings are nothing without the formulated idea that keeps them whole.
The intellectuals’ chief cause of anguish are one another’s works.
After being boxed in by man and his constructions in Europe and the East, the release into space is exhilarating. The horizon is a huge remote circle, and no hills intervene.
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.
I’ll read, and then I’ll take naps. When I feel sleep coming on, I give in and don’t fight it.
Only a great mind that is overthrown yields tragedy.
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.
Political correctness does not legislate tolerance; it only organizes hatred.
The danger that may really threaten (crime fiction) is that soon there will be more writers than readers.
Great cultural changes begin in affectation and end in routine.
Varese, Apollinaire, Ezra Pound, Leger, Gleizes, Severini, Villon, Duchamp, Duchamp-Villon, Marie Laurencin, Cocteau and many others were to me household names in the literal sense – names of familiar figures around the house.
An artist has every right – one may even say a duty – to exhibit his productions as prominently as he can.
In any assembly the simplest way to stop transacting business and split the ranks is to appeal to a principle.
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.
Since it is seldom clear whether intellectual activity denotes a superior mode of being or a vital deficiency, opinion swings between considering intellect a privilege and seeing it as a handicap.
Music is intended and designed for sentient beings that have hopes and purposes and emotions.
It is only in the shadows, when some fresh wave, truly original, truly creative, breaks upon the shore, that there will be a rediscovery of the West.
Art distills sensation and embodies it with enhanced meaning in a memorable form – or else it is not art.
In teaching you cannot see the fruit of a day’s work. It is invisible and remains so, maybe for twenty years.
Of course, clothing fashions have always been impractical, except in Tahiti.
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.
