Jacques Martin Barzun (1907–2012) was 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.
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Idealism springs from deep feelings, but feelings are nothing without the formulated idea that keeps them whole.
—Jacques Barzun
Topics: Ideals
Whoever wants to know the heart and mind of America had better learn baseball, the rules and realities of the game.
—Jacques Barzun
Topics: Baseball
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.
—Jacques Barzun
It seems a long time since the morning mail could be called correspondence.
—Jacques Barzun
Topics: Letters
The test and the use of man’s education is that he finds pleasure in the exercise of his mind.
—Jacques Barzun
Topics: Education
Teaching is not a lost art, but the regard for it is a lost tradition.
—Jacques Barzun
Topics: Education, Tradition, Teaching
Art distills sensations and embodies it with enhanced meaning.
—Jacques Barzun
Topics: Artists, Art
Of true knowledge at any time, a good part is merely convenient, necessary indeed to the worker, but not to an understanding of his subject: One can judge a building without knowing where to buy the bricks; one can understand a violin sonata without knowing how to score for the instrument. The work may in fact be better understood without a knowledge of the details of its manufacture, of attention to these tends to distract from meaning and effect.
—Jacques Barzun
Topics: Knowledge
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.
—Jacques Barzun
Topics: Creativity
Only a great mind that is overthrown yields tragedy.
—Jacques Barzun
Topics: Tragedy
In any assembly, the simplest way to stop the transacting of business and split the ranks is to appeal to a principle.
—Jacques Barzun
Great cultural changes begin in affectation and end in routine.
—Jacques Barzun
Topics: Affectation
In teaching you cannot see the fruit of a day’s work. It is invisible and remains so, maybe for twenty years.
—Jacques Barzun
Topics: Teaching
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