Jacques Barzun

“In any great organization it is far, far safer to be wrong with the majority than to be right alone.”

“The simple-minded always look for a single cause for everything.”

“Whoever wants to know the heart and mind of America had better learn baseball.”

“To be a scholar of stupidity is not to be a stupid scholar.”

“This is what it means to be a civilized man: to be a man of ideas and not of action.”

“Teaching is not a lost art, but the regard for it is a lost tradition.”

“What is a classic? A classic is a book that has never finished saying what it has to say.”

“The truth is that we have a superstition against superstition.”

“The test of a vocation is the love of the drudgery it involves.”

“The whole aim of a good education is to turn mirrors into windows.”

“Find out what you like doing best and get someone to pay you for doing it.”

“Intellect is the power of making truth visible.”

“Art distills sensations and embodies it with enhanced meaning.”

“A man who has his initials on his pyjamas must be uncertain of himself.”

“The great eras of progress are those when the mind is free to ramble.”

“Thinking is the most unhealthy thing in the world, and people die of it just as they die of any other disease.”