Jacques Barzun Quotes
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Everybody keeps calling for Excellence - excellence not just in schooling, throughout society. But as soon as somebody or something stands out as Excellent, the other shout goes up: 'Elitism!' And whatever produced that thing, whoever praises that result, is promptly put down. 'Standing out' is undemocratic.
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The intellectuals' chief cause of anguish are one another's works.
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Great cultural changes begin in affectation and end in routine.
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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.
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Criticism will need an injection of humility - that is, a recognition of its role as ancillary to the arts, needed only occasionally in a temporary capacity. Since the critic exists only for introducing and explaining, he must be readily intelligible; he has no special vocabulary: criticism is in no way a science or a system.
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Music is intended and designed for sentient beings that have hopes and purposes and emotions.
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On the one hand, society needs a common faith and vigorous institutions with the power to coerce; and on the other, the individual as a human soul or as the bearer of a new and possibly saving heresy, must be free. It is difficult enough to reconcile these two needs, but the problem holds another hazard: the need of action under the pressure of time.
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In any assembly the simplest way to stop transacting business and split the ranks is to appeal to a principle.
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If civilization has risen from the Stone Age, it can rise again from the Wastepaper Age.
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In teaching you cannot see the fruit of a day's work. It is invisible and remains so, maybe for twenty years.
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I have always been - I think any student of history almost inevitably is - a cheerful pessimist.
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My notion about any artist is that we honor him best by reading him, by playing his music, by seeing his plays or by looking at his pictures. We don't need to fall all over ourselves with adjectives and epithets. Let's play him more.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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The danger that may really threaten (crime fiction) is that soon there will be more writers than readers.
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If it were possible to talk to the unborn, one could never explain to them how it feels to be alive, for life is washed in the speechless real.
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Old age is like learning a new profession. And not one of your own choosing.
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Of course, clothing fashions have always been impractical, except in Tahiti.
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Teaching is not a lost art, but the regard for it is a lost tradition.
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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.
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Whoever wants to know the heart and mind of America had better learn baseball.
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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.