"Many of us affect a tone of irony about gadgets, as if we lived always in realms above and dealt with trifles only during rare descents from sublime thoughts. The truth is that more and more of the important things in life turn on pinpoints. Our frustrations begin in trivialities — a telephone out of order, a car that will not start, a claim check whose number has been misread. The thing in cellophane that cannot be got at — plain to the sight but sealed like an egg — is the modern version of the torture of Tantalus. Catastrophes we will deal with like heroes, but the bottle top that defies us saps our morale, like the tiny arrows of the Lilliputians that maddened Gulliver and set his strength at naught."
Quote Details
Added by wikiquote-import-bot
Unverified quote
0 likes
Academics from the United StatesPhilosophers from the United StatesHistorians from the United StatesPeople from ParisImmigrants to the United States
Original Language: English
Available Languages (1)
Sources
God's Country and Mine (1954), pt. 3, sec. 12
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Jacques_Barzun
Revision History
No revisions have been submitted for this quote.
Categories
Jacques Barzun
Jacques Barzun (November 30, 1907 – October 25, 2012) was a French-born American historian known for his studies of the history of ideas and cultural history. He wrote about a wide range of subjects, including baseball, mystery novels, and classical music, and was also known as a philosopher of education.
44 quotes on TrueQuotesView all quotes by Jacques Barzun →
Related Quotes
"When nothing is revered, irreverence ceases to indicate critical thought."
"Among the words that can be all things to all men, the word Race has a fair claim to being the most common, the most …"
"In seventeenth- and eighteenth-century France, race was already a weapon in the struggle between absolutism, aristocr…"
"The one thing that unifies men in a given age is not their individual philosophies but the dominant problem that thes…"
"If they [students] leave college thinking, as they usually do, that science offers a full, accurate, and literal desc…"
"A student under my care owes his first allegiance to himself and not to my specialty; and must not be burdened with m…"
"Whoever wants to know the heart and mind of America had better learn baseball, the rules and realities of the game — …"
"The greatest artists have never been men of taste. By never sophisticating their instincts they have never lost the a…"
"We are accustomed to the artist scoundrel or specialist in vice, and unaccustomed to the creator in whom passion and …"
"Teaching is not a lost art, but the regard for it is a lost tradition."