Jacques Barzun

Educator

1907-11-30

Books by Jacques Barzun

From Dawn to Decadence
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The Modern researcher
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The United States in Literature [with three long stories] -- Seventh Edition
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Quotes by Jacques Barzun

Bad writing, it is easily verified, has never kept scholarship from being published.
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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.
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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.
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Bad writing, it is easily verified, has never kept scholarship from being published.
Read quote
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.
Read quote
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.
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If civilization has risen from the Stone Age, it can rise again from the Wastepaper Age.
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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.
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Only a great mind that is overthrown yields tragedy.
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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.
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Art distills sensation and embodies it with enhanced meaning in memorable form-or else it is not art.
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Above all, do not talk yourself out of good ideas by trying to expound them at haphazard meetings.
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Great cultural changes begin in affectation and end in routine.
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The history of creation is but a succession of battles between amateurs of genius-inspired heretics- and orthodox professionals.
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Intellect has nothing to do with equality except to respect it as a sublime convention.
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We cannot appreciate the art of any age without first acquiring an equivalent of the experience it depicts.
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Idealism springs from deep feelings, but feelings are nothing without the formulated idea that keeps them whole.
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It is always some illusion that creates disillusion, especially in the young, for whom the only alternative to perfection is cynicism.
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The piano is the social instrument par excellence. It is drawing-room furniture, a sign of bourgeois prosperity, the most massive of the devices by which the young are tortured in the name of education, and the grown-up in the name of entertainment.
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Above all, the ability to feel the force of an argument apart from the substance it deals with is the strongest weapon against prejudice.
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