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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Music is intended and designed for sentient beings that have hopes and purposes and emotions.
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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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If civilization has risen from the Stone Age, it can rise again from the Wastepaper Age.
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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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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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In any assembly the simplest way to stop transacting business and split the ranks is to appeal to a principle.
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I have always been - I think any student of history almost inevitably is - a cheerful pessimist.
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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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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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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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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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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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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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The danger that may really threaten (crime fiction) is that soon there will be more writers than readers.
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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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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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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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An artist has every right - one may even say a duty - to exhibit his productions as prominently as he can.
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The truth is, when all is said and done, one does not teach a subject, one teaches a student how to learn it.
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Whoever wants to know the heart and mind of America had better learn baseball.