Jacques Barzun Quotes

God help the teacher, if a man of sensibility and genius, when a booby father presents him with his booby son, and insists on lighting up the rays of science in a fellow's head whose skull is impervious and inaccessible by any other way than a positive fracture with a cudgel.

The most unsuccessful three years in the education of cost estimators appears to be fifth-grade arithmetic.

I do not dislike teaching when the boys behave themselves.

I first had the idea of writing a popular book about the universe in 1982. My intention was partly to earn money to pay my daughter's school fees.

School didn't work for me. I hated it.

A book is the only immortality.

I wanted to be a teacher, but I was a lousy student, one of the slowest readers. It was a tremendous struggle. But I'm lucky I had some teachers who saw something in me.

I was dyslexic, I had no understanding of schoolwork whatsoever. I certainly would have failed IQ tests. And it was one of the reasons I left school when I was 15 years old. And if I - if I'm not interested in something, I don't grasp it.

I know what it feels like to struggle to get the education that you need.

In order to be Miss Anybody you had to have excellent grades, and I had terrible grades because of my dyslexia.

I don't know whether I much enjoyed education. I was not academically gifted.

I taught high school for one year in Deerfield Beach, Fla., and in the end, it was such an enjoyable experience breaking up fights daily, that I decided to return to the combat zone of Afghanistan.

In the end, I did end up repeating seventh grade.

Academically, I was thick. School wasn't bad, but I was.

It's hard to get an education when teachers spend 70 percent of their time trying to discipline students.

At school, I had to work really hard to get a D in maths. And I wasn't slacking off; I actually did work quite hard.

I struggled in school. Math and science were difficult for me. But I can watch 10 guys play, and I can tell you what everybody did. It might be a curse because when you see everything, sometimes you don't let your kids play.

School really didn't work for me.

I'm actually not that big a fan of reading.

I was never very good at school with... humanities... anything which was more a matter of opinion.

The carefully fostered theory that schoolwork can be made easy and enjoyable breaks down as soon as anything, however trivial, has to be learned.

I am giving this winter two courses of lectures to three students, of which one is only moderately prepared, the other less than moderately, and the third lacks both preparation and ability. Such are the onera of a mathematical profession.

Honey is sweet, "and so is knowledge, but knowledge is like the bee that made that sweet honey, you have to chase it through the pages of a book." (taken from "Thank you, Mr. Falker" )

Let us pick up our books and our pens, they are the most powerful weapons.

Science is wonderful, science is important, and so are children, so are young people, and so what could be better than to write a science book for young people?