154 Quotes by Jacques Barzun

Grab a pen and put down some words – your name even – and a title: something to see, to revise, to carve, to do over in the opposite way.

I have always been – I think any student of history almost inevitably is – a cheerful pessimist.

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.

The feeble clavichord did not carry far; the harpsichord was only a little stronger; but Cristofori in Italy was working at these defects; he built a machine he called clavicembalo piano e forte – a keyboard instrument to play “soft and loud.” Contrary to all experience, we now call it simply “a soft.

The test and the use of man’s education is that he finds pleasure in the exercise of his mind.

Only a great mind that is overthrown yields tragedy.

The beloved’s features too were standardized in certain adjectives of color and shape and likened to natural objects, fruit and flowers especially. As a result, ingenuity in finding fresh ways to follow the pattern was required in addition to actual poetic powers. The challenge was great and it accounts for the quantity of verbal lovemaking in the blue, addressed to the remote or non-existent tribes of Celias and Delias.

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.

What we ask of a writer in the first place is a unique voice. We ask for the rest later, and we may even pretend that it is only the later things we required – no personal, individual, induplicable quality, just pure art.