Jacques Barzun Quotes

No creator was prompted by a desire to serve his brothers, for his brothers rejected the gift he offered and that gift destroyed the slothful routine of their lives. His truth was his only motive.

Men of passion and vision are often seen as mad.

Towering genius disdains a beaten path ... It scorns to tread in the footsteps of any predecessor, however illustrious. It thirsts for distinction.

No one can bar me from joyfully proceeding on what the great masters have left us; after all, to rediscover everything again, should be understood to be unfounded. But one should however proceed on merit, and not simply repeat wat was. All genius, sincere, deserves his place, even though maybe later in life.

It should be possible to say that there really is such as thing as "genius" and that what it is, is precisely a surprising and unexpected movement away from collective patterns of behavior and received wisdom.

The creative members of an orthodoxy, any orthodoxy, ultimately outgrow their disciplines.

What is most original in a man's nature is often that which is most desperate. Thus new systems are forced on the world by men who simply cannot bear the pain of living with what is. Creators care nothing for their systems except that they be unique. If Hitler had been born in Nazi Germany he wouldn't have been content to enjoy the atmosphere.

Improvement makes strait roads, but the crooked roads without Improvement, are roads of Genius.

What counts alone is the innovator, the dissenter, the harbinger of things unheard of, the man who rejects the traditional standards and aims at substituting new values and ideas for old ones.

Genius ... is necessarily intolerant of fetters.

Let none presume to measure the irregularities of Michael Angelo or Socrates by village scales.

Just as no great painting has ever been created by a committee, no great vision has ever emerged from the herd.

Genius is the error in the system.

You can't have a masterpiece without madness.

Genius discovers a system; average talent stereotypes it till it is shattered by fresh genius.

One must indeed be ignorant of the methods of genius to suppose that it allows itself to be cramped by forms. Forms are for mediocrity, and it is fortunate that mediocrity can act only according to routine. Ability takes its flight unhindered.

Nothing great or enduring, especially in music, has ever sprung full-fledged and unprecedented from the brain of any master; the best he gives to the world he gathers from the hearts of the people, and runs it through the alembic of his genius.

Contradictions if well understood and managed can spark off the fires of invention. Orthodoxy whether of the right or of the left is the graveyard of creativity.

A popular author is one who writes what the people think. Genius invites them to think something else.

The stigma of oddness is the price a myopic world always exacts of genius.

Genius is often called crazy, but crazy is never called genius. So you just have to put out the work and let the chips fall where they may.

All the heroes of tomorrow are the heretics of today.

Genius does not care much for a set of explicit regulations, but that does not mean that genius is lawless.

It takes a touch of genius - and a lot of courage to move in the opposite direction.

Most of the things I do are misunderstood. Hey, after all, being misunderstood is the fate of all true geniuses, is it not?