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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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Jacques Barzun
Age: 104 †
Born: 1907
Born: November 30
Died: 2012
Died: October 25
Critic
Cultural Historian
Historian
Philosopher
University Teacher
Writer
Art
Offers
Skill
Great
Skills
Offer
Never
Awareness
Popular
Men
Taste
Simplicity
Challenges
Instinct
Simplicities
Greatest
Competition
Relish
Lost
Challenge
Instincts
Artist
Artists
Appetite

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Old age is like learning a new profession. And not one of your own choosing.
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Intellect has nothing to do with equality except to respect it as a sublime convention.
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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.
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In teaching you cannot see the fruit of a day's work. It is invisible and remains so, maybe for twenty years.
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The educated man had throughout the ages found a way to covert passionate activity into silent and motionless pleasure. He can sit still in a room and not perish.
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Time and rest are needed for absorption. Psychologists confirm that it is really in the summer that our muscles learn to skate and in the winter, how to swim.
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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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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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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 perhaps in addition, lend a hand in improving society, after schooling is done.
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To delve into history entails, besides the grievance of hard work, the danger that in the depths one may lose one’s scapegoats.
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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.
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Tennis belongs to the individualistic past - a hero, or at most a pair of friends or lovers, against the world.
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Art distills sensation and embodies it with enhanced meaning in a memorable form - or else it is not art.
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Simple English is no one’s mother tongue. It has to be worked for.
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Education in the United States is a passion and a paradox. Millions want it, and commend it, and are busy about it. At the same time they degrade it by trying to get it free of charge and free of work.
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In producers, loafing is productive and no creator, of whatever magnitude, has ever been able to skip that stage, any more than a mother can skip gestation.
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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.
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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.
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Science is an all-pervasive energy, for it is at once a mode of thought, a source of strong emotion, and a faith as fanatical as any in history.
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