Quote

It is always some illusion that creates disillusion, especially in the young, for whom the only alternative to perfection is cynicism.

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
Creates
Illusion
Perfection
Especially
Young
Disillusion
Always
Cynicism
Alternative
Alternatives

More quotes by Jacques Barzun

Image
Music is intended and designed for sentient beings that have hopes and purposes and emotions.
Jacques Barzun
Image
When people accept futility and the absurd as normal, the culture is decadent.
Jacques Barzun
Image
Only a great mind that is overthrown yields tragedy
Jacques Barzun
Image
Finding oneself was a misnomer a self is not found but made.
Jacques Barzun
Image
Teaching is not a lost art, but the regard for it is a lost tradition.
Jacques Barzun
Image
The piano is the social instrument par excellence... 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.
Jacques Barzun
Image
Great cultural changes begin in affectation and end in routine.
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
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
In teaching you cannot see the fruit of a day's work. It is invisible and remains so, maybe for twenty years.
Jacques Barzun
Image
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
Image
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
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
Like Rousseau, whom he resembles even more than he resembles Voltaire, Shaw never gave a social form to his assertiveness, never desired to arrive and to assimilate himself, or wield authority as of right.
Jacques Barzun
Image
The intellectuals' chief cause of anguish are one another's works.
Jacques Barzun
Image
Above all, do not talk yourself out of good ideas by trying to expound them at haphazard meetings.
Jacques Barzun
Image
Out of man's mind in free play comes the creation Science. It renews itself, like the generations, thanks to an activity which is the best game of homo ludens: science is in the strictest and best sense a glorious entertainment.
Jacques Barzun
Image
Highly-adaptive, informal networks move diagonally and eliptically, skipping entire functions to get things done.
Jacques Barzun
Image
I have always been - I think any student of history almost inevitably is - a cheerful pessimist.
Jacques Barzun
Image
Speech, after all, is in some measure an expression of character, and flexibility in its use is a good way to tell your friends from the robots.
Jacques Barzun