A biography for Jacques Barzunhasn’t been written yet.
“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.”
“Varese, Apollinaire, Ezra Pound, Leger, Gleizes, Severini, Villon, Duchamp, Duchamp-Villon, Marie Laurencin, Cocteau and many others were to me household names in the literal sense - names of familiar figures around the house.”
“An artist has every right - one may even say a duty - to exhibit his productions as prominently as he can.”
“The test and the use of man's education is that he finds pleasure in the exercise of his mind.”
“In any assembly the simplest way to stop transacting business and split the ranks is to appeal to a principle.”
“The danger that may really threaten (crime fiction) is that soon there will be more writers than readers.”
“If it were possible to talk to the unborn, one could never explain to them how it feels to be alive, for life is washed in the speechless real.”
“In teaching you cannot see the fruit of a day's work. It is invisible and remains so, maybe for twenty years.”
“Of course, clothing fashions have always been impractical, except in Tahiti.”
“It seems a long time since the morning mail could be called correspondence.”
“I have always been - I think any student of history almost inevitably is - a cheerful pessimist.”
“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.”
“Bad writing, it is easily verified, has never kept scholarship from being published.”
“Great cultural changes begin in affectation and end in routine.”
“If civilization has risen from the Stone Age, it can rise again from the Wastepaper Age.”
“Since it is seldom clear whether intellectual activity denotes a superior mode of being or a vital deficiency, opinion swings between considering intellect a privilege and seeing it as a handicap.”
“The intellectuals' chief cause of anguish are one another's works.”
“Only a great mind that is overthrown yields tragedy.”
“After being boxed in by man and his constructions in Europe and the East, the release into space is exhilarating. The horizon is a huge remote circle, and no hills intervene.”
“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.”