Jaques Barzun: QUOTES

1) Teaching is not a lost art, but the regard for it is a lost tradition. (!!!!!!!)

2) Art distills sensation and embodies it with enhanced meaning in a memorable form - or else it is not art.
 
3) Great cultural changes begin in affectation and end in routine.
 
4) Idealism springs from deep feelings, but feelings are nothing without the formulated idea that keeps them whole.
 
5) In any assembly the simplest way to stop transacting business and split the ranks is to appeal to a principal.
 
6) 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.  

7) In teaching you cannot see the fruit of a day's work. It is invisible and remains so, maybe for twenty years.
 
8) It seems a long time since the morning mail could be called correspondence.
 
9) Music is intended and designed for sentient beings that have hopes and purposes and emotions.
 
10) Not even the visionary or mystical experience ever lasts very long. It is for art to capture that experience, to offer it to, in the case of literature, its readers; to be, for a secular, materialist culture, some sort of replacement for what the love of god offers in the world of faith.

11) Only a great mind that is overthrown yields tragedy.
 
 12) The more a man cultivates the arts the less he fornicates. A more and more apparent cleavage occurs between the spirit and the brute.
 
13) The piano is the social instrument par excellence , [a piece of] 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.

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

15) Whoever wants to know the heart and mind of America had better learn baseball, the rules and realities of the game - and do it by watching first some high school or small-town teams.