Quotes by Jacques Barzun

“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.”

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

“Except among those whose education has been in the minimalist style, it is understood that hasty moral judgments about people in the past are a form of injustice.”

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

“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”

“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, induplicabl...”

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

“In teaching you cannot see the fruit of a day's work. It is invisible and remains so, maybe for twenty years.”

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

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

“Schools are not intended to moralize a wicked world, but to impart knowledge and develop intelligence, with only two social aims in mind: prepare to take on one's share in the world's work, and per...”

“Whoever wants to know the hearts and minds of America had better learn baseball.”

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

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

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

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

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

“"Plain English" - everybody loves it demands it - from the other fellow.”

“The root difficulty in all cases was the state of being blind and deaf to words-- not seeing the words for the prose. Being adults, they had forgotten what every child understands, which is giving ...”

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