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Simple English is no one’s mother tongue. It has to be worked for.

Jacques Barzun

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Jacques Barzun
Age: 104 †
Born: 1907
Born: November 30
Died: 2012
Died: October 25
Critic
Cultural Historian
Historian
Philosopher
University Teacher
Writer
Tongue
English
Worked
Simple
Mother

More quotes by Jacques Barzun

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Old age is like learning a new profession. And not one of your own choosing.
Jacques Barzun
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If civilization has risen from the Stone Age, it can rise again from the Wastepaper Age.
Jacques Barzun
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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.
Jacques Barzun
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The professionals resemble and recognize each other by virtue of the stigmata that their trade has left upon them. They are like the dog in the fable, whose collar has made an indelible mark around his neck. The amateur is the shaggy wolf whom no dog had better trust too far.
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Above all, do not talk yourself out of good ideas by trying to expound them at haphazard meetings.
Jacques Barzun
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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.
Jacques Barzun
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Music, not being made up of objects nor referring to objects, is intangible and ineffable it can only be as it were inhaled by the spirit: the rest is silence.
Jacques Barzun
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Only a great mind that is overthrown yields tragedy
Jacques Barzun
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I have always been - I think any student of history almost inevitably is - a cheerful pessimist.
Jacques Barzun
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Bad writing, it is easily verified, has never kept scholarship from being published.
Jacques Barzun
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For the educated, the authority of science rested on the strictness of its methods for the mass, it rested on the powers of explanation.
Jacques Barzun
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To watch a football game is to be in a prolonged neurotic doubt as to what you're seeing. It's more like an emergency happening at a distance than a game. I don't wonder the spectators take to drink.
Jacques Barzun
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When people accept futility and the absurd as normal, the culture is decadent.
Jacques Barzun
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Tennis belongs to the individualistic past - a hero, or at most a pair of friends or lovers, against the world.
Jacques Barzun
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Of course, clothing fashions have always been impractical, except in Tahiti.
Jacques Barzun
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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.
Jacques Barzun
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Baseball is a kind of collective chess with arms and legs in full play under sunlight.
Jacques Barzun
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The greatest artists have never been men of taste. By never sophisticating their instincts they have never lost the awareness of the great simplicities, which they relish both from appetite and from the challenge these offer to skill in competition with popular art.
Jacques Barzun
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The ever-present impulse is to push against restriction and, in so doing, to feel intolerably hemmed in. Thus in practice, every liberation increases the sense of oppression. Nor is the paradox merely in the mind: the laws enacted to secure the rights of every person and group, by creating protective boundaries, create new barriers.
Jacques Barzun
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Let us face a pluralistic world in which there are no universal churches, no single remedy for all diseases, no one way to teach or write or sing, no magic diet, no world poets, and no chosen races, but only the wretched and wonderfully diversified human race.
Jacques Barzun