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Jacques Barzun Biography

Jacques Martin Barzun (November 30, 1907 – October 25, 2012) was a French-American historian known for his studies of the history of ideas and cultural history. He wrote about a wide range of subjects, including baseball, mystery novels, and classical music, and was also known as a philosopher of education. In the book Teacher in America (1945), Barzun influenced the training of schoolteachers in the United States.

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Jacques Barzun Quotes

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

Expression, Fancy, Looks, Old, Terms, Themavoid

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.

Hasty, Judging, Judgments, Moral, Past, Style

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

Art, Aspiring, Learn, Unique, Writing

Can an idea a notion as abstract as Relativism produce by itself the effects alleged? cause all the harm, destroy all the lives and reputations? I am as far as anyone can be from denying the power of ideas in history, but the suggestion that a philosophy (as Relativism is often called) has perverted millions and debased daily life is on the face of it absurd. No idea working alone has ever demoralized society, and there have been plenty of ideas simpler and more exciting than Relativism.

Alone, Faces, Ideas, Lives, Notion, Philosophy

Music is intended and designed for sentient beings that have hopes and purposes and emotions.

Emotion, Emotions, Music, Purpose, Purposes

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

Force, Prejudice, Strongest, Substance, Weapons

Of true knowledge at any time, a good part is merely convenient, necessary indeed to the worker, but not to an understanding of his subject: One can judge a building without knowing where to buy the bricks; one can understand a violin sonata without knowing how to score for the instrument. The work may in fact be better understood without a knowledge of the details of its manufacture, of attention to these tends to distract from meaning and effect.

Good, Judging, Knowing, Knowledge, Violin, Work

Seeing clearly within himself and always able to dodge around the ends of any position, including his own, Shaw assumed from the start the dual role of prophet and gadfly. To his contemporaries it appeared frivolous and contradictory to perform as both superman and socialist, sceptic and believer, legalist and heretic, high-brow and mob-orator. But feeling the duty to teach as well as to mirror mankind, Shaw did not accept himself as a contradictory being.

Able, Dual, Feelings, Heretic, Mirrors, Start

Universities incline wits to sophistry and affectation.

Affectation, Funny, Humor, Incline, Literature, Wits

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

Acquiring, Age, Appreciate, Art, Experience

Only a great mind that is overthrown yields tragedy

Mind, Overthrown, Tragedy, Yield, Yields

The nation in arms is virtually a communist state: the people must be paid wages and fed and protected and regimented behind the lines as much as on the front. Minds must be kept loyal and at the right pitch of hate, so that successive drafts of fighters are accepted without murmurings. Letters and newspapers must be censored while the propaganda mill grinds on. As for decisions of strategy and overall command, they must please many masters: dissenters in the cabinet, the heads of the allied states and public opinion. Hence failures must be disguised or concealed.

Allied, Hate, Lines, People, Tyrants, Virtually

Life is given us as a passion.

Given, Life, Life Is, Passion

The danger that may really threaten (crime fiction) is that soon there will be more writers than readers

Crime, Fiction, May, Readers, Writers

Shaw does not merely decorate a proposition, but makes his way from point to point through new and difficult territory. This explains why Shaw must either be taken whole or left alone. He must be disassembled and put together again with nothing left out, under pain of incomprehension; for his politics, his art, and his religion to say nothing of the shape of his sentences are unique expressions of this enormously enlarged and yet concentrated consciousness.

Art, Enormously, Pain, Taken, Territory

It is not clear to anyone, least of all the practitioners, how science and technology in their headlong course do or should influence ethics and law, education and government, art and social philosophy, religion and the life of the affections. Yet 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.

Art, Strong, Philosophy, Mode, Influence

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.

Citizen, Citizens, Deem, Democracy, Important, Individual

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

Advice, Good, Haphazard, Ideas, Trying

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.

Block, Fond, Memories, Research, Subject

An artist has every right - one may even say a duty - to exhibit his productions as prominently as he can.

Artist, May, Productions, Reality, Say

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