Jacques Barzun Quotes - Page 2

The one thing that unifies men in a given age is not their individual philosophies but the dominant problem that these philosophies are designed to solve.

Above all, do not talk yourself out of good ideas by trying to expound them at haphazard meetings.

I can only think that the book is read because it deals with the difficulties of schooling, which do not change. Please note: the difficulties, not the problems. Problems are solved or disappear with the revolving times. Difficulities remain. It will always be difficult to teach well, to learn accurately; to read, write, and count readily and competently; to acquire a sense of history and start one's education or anothers.

Time and rest are needed for absorption. Psychologists confirm that it is really in the summer that our muscles learn to skate and in the winter, how to swim.

Let us face a pluralistic world in which there are no universal churches, no single remedy for all diseases, no one way to teach or write or sing, no magic diet, no world poets, and no chosen races, but only the wretched and wonderfully diversified human race.

The educated man had throughout the ages found a way to covert passionate activity into silent and motionless pleasure. He can sit still in a room and not perish.

A person is not a democrat thanks to his ignorance of literature and the arts, nor an elitist because he or she has cultivated them. The possession of knowledge makes for unjust power over others only if used for that very purpose: a physician or lawyer or clergyman can exploit or humiliate others, or he can be a humanitarian and a benefactor. In any case, it is absurd to conjure up behind anybody who exploits his educated status the existence of an "elite" scheming to oppress the rest of us.

I once worked as a salesman and was very independent. I took orders from no one.

For the educated, the authority of science rested on the strictness of its methods; for the mass, it rested on the powers of explanation.

Regarding the idea of race, .. no agreement seems to exist about what race means. Race seems to embody a fact as simple and as obvious as the noonday sun, but if that is so, why the endless wrangling about the idea and the facts of race. What is a race? How can it be recognized? Who constitute the several races?.

It is always some illusion that creates disillusion, especially in the young, for whom the only alternative to perfection is cynicism.

Americans began by loving youth, and now, out of adult self-pity, they worship it.

The philosophical implication of race-thinking is that by offering us the mystery of heredity as an explanation, it diverts our attention from the social and intellectual factors that make up personality.

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.

Baseball is a kind of collective chess with arms and legs in full play under sunlight.

The ascetic is often a sensualist who has reached the limit of his capacity.

Highly-adaptive, informal networks move diagonally and eliptically, skipping entire functions to get things done.

Science is, in the best and strictest sense, glorious entertainment

The greatest artists have never been men of taste. By never sophisticating their instincts they have never lost the awareness of the great simplicities, which they relish both from appetite and from the challenge these offer to skill in competition with popular art.

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

In a large university, there are as many deans and executive heads as there are schools and departments. Their relations to one another are intricate and periodic; in fact, "galaxy" is too loose a term: it is a planetarium of deans with the President of the University as a central sun. One can see eclipses, inner systems, and oppositions.

Science is an all-pervasive energy, for it is at once a mode of thought, a source of strong emotion, and a faith as fanatical as any in history.

We are accustomed to the artist scoundrel or specialist in vice, and unaccustomed to the creator in whom passion and reason and moral integrity hold in balance. But greatness of intellect and feeling, or soul and conduct - magnanimity, in short - does occur; it is not a myth for boy scouts, and its reality is important, if only to give us the true range of the term "human," which we so regularly define by its lower reaches.

I'll read, and then I'll take naps. When I feel sleep coming on, I give in and don't fight 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.