Quote

The intellectuals' chief cause of anguish are one another's works.

Jacques Barzun

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Jacques Barzun
Age: 104 †
Born: 1907
Born: November 30
Died: 2012
Died: October 25
Critic
Cultural Historian
Historian
Philosopher
University Teacher
Writer
Chiefs
Works
Cause
Causes
Science
Another
Intellectuals
Anguish
Chief

More quotes by Jacques Barzun

Image
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
Image
Life is given us as a passion.
Jacques Barzun
Image
The one thing that unifies men in a given age is not their individual philosophies but the dominant problem that these philosophies are designed to solve.
Jacques Barzun
Image
On reflection, moral judgment in the arts appears rather as a tribute to their power to influence emotion and possibly conduct. And reflecting further on what some critics do today, one sees that a good many have merely shifted the ground of their moralism, transferring their impulse of righteousness to politics and social issues.
Jacques Barzun
Image
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.
Jacques Barzun
Image
The book, like the bicycle, is a perfect form.
Jacques Barzun
Image
Tennis belongs to the individualistic past - a hero, or at most a pair of friends or lovers, against the world.
Jacques Barzun
Image
The philosophical implication of race-thinking is that by offering us the mystery of heredity as an explanation, it diverts our attention from the social and intellectual factors that make up personality.
Jacques Barzun
Image
If civilization has risen from the Stone Age, it can rise again from the Wastepaper Age.
Jacques Barzun
Image
Above all, the ability to feel the force of an argument apart from the substance it deals with is the strongest weapon against prejudice.
Jacques Barzun
Image
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
Image
You never step in the same river of thought twice, because neither you nor it are the same.
Jacques Barzun
Image
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
Image
When people accept futility and the absurd as normal, the culture is decadent.
Jacques Barzun
Image
I'll read, and then I'll take naps. When I feel sleep coming on, I give in and don't fight it.
Jacques Barzun
Image
It is always some illusion that creates disillusion, especially in the young, for whom the only alternative to perfection is cynicism.
Jacques Barzun
Image
The truth is, when all is said and done, one does not teach a subject, one teaches a student how to learn it.
Jacques Barzun
Image
Simple English is no one’s mother tongue. It has to be worked for.
Jacques Barzun
Image
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.
Jacques Barzun
Image
Great cultural changes begin in affectation and end in routine.
Jacques Barzun