Top 80 Jacques Barzun Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “When people accept futility and the absurd as normal, the culture is decadent.”

— Jacques Barzun

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

— Jacques Barzun

3. “Teaching is not a lost art, but the regard for it is a lost tradition.”

— Jacques Barzun

4. “The truth is, when all is said and done, one does not teach a subject, one teaches a student how to learn it. Teaching may look like administering a dose, but even a dose must be worked on by the body if it is to cure. Each individual must cure his or her own ignorance.”

— Jacques Barzun

5. “The world has long observed that small acts of immorality, if repeated, will destroy character. It is equally manifest, though never said, that uttering nonsense and half-truth without cease ends by destroying Intellect.”

— Jacques Barzun

6. “Finding oneself was a misnomer; a self is not found but made.”

— Jacques Barzun

7. “Simple English is no one’s mother tongue. It has to be worked for.”

— Jacques Barzun

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

— Jacques Barzun

9. “Science is, in the best and strictest sense, glorious entertainment.”

— Jacques Barzun

10. “The reason why research is like sculpting from memory is that in neither is there a concrete visible subject to copy directly. The subject – as sculptors themselves are fond of saying – is hidden in the block of material.”

— Jacques Barzun

11. “Writing, at least a craft and at its best an art, aspiring to the unique, is the most difficult to learn.”

— Jacques Barzun

12. “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.”

— Jacques Barzun

13. “Art distills sensation and embodies it with enhanced meaning in a memorable form – or else it is not art.”

— Jacques Barzun

14. “Convince yourself that you are working in clay, not marble, on paper not eternal bronze: Let that first sentence be as stupid as it wishes.”

— Jacques Barzun

15. “To denounce does not free the self from what it hates, any more than ignoring the past shuts off its influence.”

— Jacques Barzun

16. “History, like a vast river, propels logs, vegetation, rafts, and debris; it is full of live and dead things, some destined for resurrection; it mingles many waters and holds in solution invisible substances stolen from distant soils.”

— Jacques Barzun

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

— Jacques Barzun

18. “You never step in the same river of thought twice, because neither you nor it are the same.”

— Jacques Barzun

19. “The sole justification of teaching, of the school itself, is that the student comes out of it able to do something he could not do before. I say do and not know, because knowledge that doesn’t lead to doing something new or doing something better is not knowledge at all.”

— Jacques Barzun

20. “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.”

— Jacques Barzun

21. “The test and the use of man’s education is that he finds pleasure in the exercise of his mind.”

— Jacques Barzun

22. “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.”

— Jacques Barzun

23. “Grab a pen and put down some words – your name even – and a title: something to see, to revise, to carve, to do over in the opposite way.”

— Jacques Barzun

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

— Jacques Barzun

25. “Only a great mind that is overthrown yields tragedy.”

— Jacques Barzun

26. “The book, like the bicycle, is a perfect form.”

— Jacques Barzun

27. “The professionals resemble and recognize each other by virtue of the stigmata that their trade has left upon them. They are like the dog in the fable, whose collar has made an indelible mark around his neck. The amateur is the shaggy wolf whom no dog had better trust too far.”

— Jacques Barzun

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

— Jacques Barzun

29. “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

30. “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.”

— Jacques Barzun

31. “Maxims in times of danger are useless, experience is incommunicable. The knotted strands of life, desire, assumptions, and moral codes cannot be unsnarled; they can only be cut, which is what happens when an air raid occurs, with a silencing fortissimo like the finale of a Beethoven symphony.”

— Jacques Barzun

32. “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.”

— Jacques Barzun

33. “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.”

— Jacques Barzun

34. “A student under my care owes his first allegiance to himself and not to my specialty; and must not be burdened with my work as if he followed no other and had contracted no obligation under heaven but that of satisfying my requirements.”

— Jacques Barzun

35. “The truth is, when all is said and done, one does not teach a subject, one teaches a student how to learn it.”

— Jacques Barzun

36. “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

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

— Jacques Barzun

38. “The history of creation is but a succession of battles between amateurs of genius-inspired heretics- and orthodox professionals.”

— Jacques Barzun

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

— Jacques Barzun

40. “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.”

— Jacques Barzun

41. “I’ll read, and then I’ll take naps. When I feel sleep coming on, I give in and don’t fight it.”

— Jacques Barzun

42. “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.”

— Jacques Barzun

43. “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.”

— Jacques Barzun

44. “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.”

— Jacques Barzun

45. “Life is given us as a passion.”

— Jacques Barzun

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

— Jacques Barzun

47. “Intellect has nothing to do with equality except to respect it as a sublime convention.”

— Jacques Barzun

48. “Boredom and fatigue are great historical forces.”

— Jacques Barzun

49. “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.”

— Jacques Barzun

50. “Universities incline wits to sophistry and affectation.”

— Jacques Barzun