Top 80 Jacques Barzun Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “Tennis belongs to the individualistic past – a hero, or at most a pair of friends or lovers, against the world.”

— Jacques Barzun

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

— Jacques Barzun

53. “Music, not being made up of objects nor referring to objects, is intangible and ineffable; it can only be as it were inhaled by the spirit: the rest is silence.”

— Jacques Barzun

54. “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.”

— Jacques Barzun

55. “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.”

— Jacques Barzun

56. “Out of man’s mind in free play comes the creation Science. It renews itself, like the generations, thanks to an activity which is the best game of homo ludens: science is in the strictest and best sense a glorious entertainment.”

— Jacques Barzun

57. “Whoever wants to know the heart and mind of America had better learn baseball.”

— Jacques Barzun

58. “Bernard Shaw remains the only model we have of what the citizen of a democracy should be: an informed participant in all things we deem important to the society and the individual.”

— Jacques Barzun

59. “Above all, the ability to feel the force of an argument apart from the substance it deals with is the strongest weapon against prejudice.”

— Jacques Barzun

60. “Democracy, to maintain itself, must repeatedly conquer every cell and corner of the nation. How many of our public institutions and private businesses, our schools, hospitals, and domestic hearths are in reality little fascist states where freedom of speech is more rigorously excluded than vermin?”

— Jacques Barzun

61. “Political correctness does not legislate tolerance; it only organizes hatred.”

— Jacques Barzun

62. “Speech, after all, is in some measure an expression of character, and flexibility in its use is a good way to tell your friends from the robots.”

— Jacques Barzun

63. “Look for all fancy wordings and get rid of themAvoid all terms and expressions, old or new, that embody affectation.”

— Jacques Barzun

64. “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.”

— Jacques Barzun

65. “I have always been – I think any student of history almost inevitably is – a cheerful pessimist.”

— Jacques Barzun

66. “The mind tends to run along the groove of one’s intention and overlook the actual expression.”

— Jacques Barzun

67. “The beloved’s features too were standardized in certain adjectives of color and shape and likened to natural objects, fruit and flowers especially. As a result, ingenuity in finding fresh ways to follow the pattern was required in addition to actual poetic powers. The challenge was great and it accounts for the quantity of verbal lovemaking in the blue, addressed to the remote or non-existent tribes of Celias and Delias.”

— Jacques Barzun

68. “We may complain and cavil at the anarchy which is the amateurs natural element, but in soberness we must agree that if the amateur did not exist it would be necessary to invent him.”

— Jacques Barzun

69. “Of course, clothing fashions have always been impractical, except in Tahiti.”

— Jacques Barzun

70. “It seems a long time since the morning mail could be called correspondence.”

— Jacques Barzun

71. “The reason teaching has to go on is that children are not born human; they are made so.”

— Jacques Barzun

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

— Jacques Barzun

73. “We cannot appreciate the art of any age without first acquiring an equivalent of the experience it depicts.”

— Jacques Barzun

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

— Jacques Barzun

75. “Bad writing, it is easily verified, has never kept scholarship from being published.”

— Jacques Barzun

76. “Strangers who have seen Shaw face to face are wont to report their surprise at his gentleness and consideration, his willingness to listen and his complete lack of pose.”

— Jacques Barzun

77. “Great cultural changes begin in affectation and end in routine.”

— Jacques Barzun

78. “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.”

— Jacques Barzun

79. “Like Rousseau, whom he resembles even more than he resembles Voltaire, Shaw never gave a social form to his assertiveness, never desired to arrive and to assimilate himself, or wield authority as of right.”

— Jacques Barzun

80. “In any assembly the simplest way to stop transacting business and split the ranks is to appeal to a principle.”

— Jacques Barzun

81. “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.”

— Jacques Barzun

82. “Take a portion of wit, And fashion it fit, Like a needle, with point and with eye: A point that can wound, An eye to look round, And at folly or vice let it fly.”

— Jacques Barzun

83. “To watch a football game is to be in a prolonged neurotic doubt as to what you’re seeing. It’s more like an emergency happening at a distance than a game. I don’t wonder the spectators take to drink.”

— Jacques Barzun

84. “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

85. “No one has ever used historical examples, near or remote, with the detail, precision, and directness to be found in every page of Shaw.”

— Jacques Barzun

86. “What we ask of a writer in the first place is a unique voice. We ask for the rest later, and we may even pretend that it is only the later things we required – no personal, individual, induplicable quality, just pure art.”

— Jacques Barzun