Quote

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

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
Artist
Artists
Appetite
Art
Offers
Skill
Great
Skills
Offer
Never
Awareness
Popular
Men
Taste
Simplicity
Challenges
Instinct
Simplicities
Greatest
Competition
Relish
Lost
Challenge
Instincts

More quotes by Jacques Barzun

Image
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.
Jacques Barzun
Image
Highly-adaptive, informal networks move diagonally and eliptically, skipping entire functions to get things done.
Jacques Barzun
Image
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.
Jacques Barzun
Image
You never step in the same river of thought twice, because neither you nor it are the same.
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
Baseball is a kind of collective chess with arms and legs in full play under sunlight.
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
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
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
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.
Jacques Barzun
Image
The book, like the bicycle, is a perfect form.
Jacques Barzun
Image
Teaching is not a lost art, but the regard for it is a lost tradition.
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
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
Image
Old age is like learning a new profession. And not one of your own choosing.
Jacques Barzun
Image
To delve into history entails, besides the grievance of hard work, the danger that in the depths one may lose one’s scapegoats.
Jacques Barzun
Image
The intellectuals' chief cause of anguish are one another's works.
Jacques Barzun
Image
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.
Jacques Barzun
Image
Strangers who have seen Shaw face to face are wont to report their surprise at his gentleness and consideration, his willingness to listen and his complete lack of pose.
Jacques Barzun