Jacques Barzun
Jacques Barzun
Jacques Martin Barzunwas a French-born American historian. Focusing on ideas and culture, he wrote about a wide range of subjects, including baseball and classical music. He was also known as a philosopher of education. In the book Teacher in America, Barzun influenced the training of schoolteachers in the United States...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionEducator
Date of Birth30 November 1907
CountryUnited States of America
silence spirit ineffable
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.
morning fog long
It seems a long time since the morning mail could be called correspondence.
art interesting rewards
The eager or dutiful persons who subject themselves to these tidal waves of the classics and the moderns find everything wonderful in an absent-minded way. The wonder washes over them rather than into them, and one of its effects is to make anything shocking or odd suddenly interesting enough to gain a month's celebrity. And so another by-product of our come-one, come-all policy is the tendency to reward cleverness, not art, and to put one more hurdle in the path of the truly original artist.
important democracy citizens
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.
school hands two
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.
reality artist may
An artist has every right - one may even say a duty - to exhibit his productions as prominently as he can.
book perfect form
The book, like the bicycle, is a perfect form.
people normal culture
When people accept futility and the absurd as normal, the culture is decadent.
reading intellectual important
no subject of study is more important than reading…all other intellectual powers depend on it.
men silence age
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.
teaching school learning
The sole justification of teaching, of the school itself, is that the student comes out of it able to do something he could not do before. I say do and not know, because knowledge that doesn't lead to doing something new or doing something better is not knowledge at all.
hero past tennis
Tennis belongs to the individualistic past - a hero, or at most a pair of friends or lovers, against the world.
fashion eye looks
Take a portion of wit, And fashion it fit, Like a needle, with point and with eye: A point that can wound, An eye to look round, And at folly or vice let it fly
splits way principles
In any assembly the simplest way to stop transacting business and split the ranks is to appeal to a principle.