Top 36 Bernard Berenson Quotes
#1. [Describing his house:] It is a library with living rooms attached.
Bernard Berenson
#3. Boast is always a cry of despair, except in the young it is a cry of hope.
Bernard Berenson
#4. When everything else physical and mental seems to diminish, the appreciation of beauty is on the increase.
Bernard Berenson
#5. Art is mind and heart and touch as much and more than it is mere instrument, technique - without which however it cannot exist at all.
Bernard Berenson
#7. Not what man knows but what man feels, concerns art. All else is science.
Bernard Berenson
#8. German is of stone, limestone, pudding stone, marble, granite even, and so to a considerable degree is English, whereas French is bronze and gives out a metallic resonance with tones that neither German nor English tolerate.
Bernard Berenson
#9. Literature in its most comprehensive sense is the autobiography of humanity.
Bernard Berenson
#10. Life has taught me that it is not for our faults that we are disliked and even hated, but for our qualities.
Bernard Berenson
#11. Consistency requires you to be as ignorant today as you were a year ago.
Bernard Berenson
#12. I wonder whether art has a higher function than to make me feel, appreciate, and enjoy natural objects for their art value?
Bernard Berenson
#13. Government lasts as long as the under-taxed can defend themselves against the over-taxed.
Bernard Berenson
#14. I would willingly stand at street corners, hat in hand, begging passerby to drop their unused minutes into it.
Bernard Berenson
#15. All of the arts, poetry, music, ritual, the visible arts, the theater, must singly and together create the most comprehensive art of all, a humanized society, and its masterpiece, free man
Bernard Berenson
#16. You can parody and make fun of almost anything, but that does not turn the universe into a caricature.
Bernard Berenson
#17. No artifact is a work of art if it does not help to humanize us. Without art ... our world would have remained a jungle.
Bernard Berenson
#18. I never felt that there was anything enviable in youth. I cannot recall that any of us, as youths, admired our condition to excess or had a desire to prolong it.
Bernard Berenson
#19. From childhood on I have had the dream of life lived as a sacrament ... the dream implied taking life ritually as something holy.
Bernard Berenson
#20. International affairs will be placed on a better footing when it is understood that there is no way of punishing a people for the crimes of its rulers.
Bernard Berenson
#21. The average European does not seem to feel free until he succeeds in enslaving and oppressing others.
Bernard Berenson
#23. In figure painting, the type of all painting, I have endeavoured to set forth that the principal if not sole source of life enchantments are Tactile Values, Movement and Space Composition.
Bernard Berenson
#24. It makes me happy to encounter goodness, love of work, humane intelligence, and people no matter at what kind of job, be it ever so humble, or ever so exalted, who do it well and con amore.
Bernard Berenson
#26. As I got warmed up, and felt perfectly at home in talk, I heard myself boasting, lying, exaggerating. Oh, not deliberately, far from it. It would be unconvivial and dull to stop and arrest the flow of talk, and speak only after carefully considering whether I was telling the truth.
Bernard Berenson
#27. Psychoanalysts are not occupied with the minds of their patients; they do not believe in the mind but in a cerebral intestine.
Bernard Berenson
#28. I am only a picture-taster, the way others are wine-or tea-tasters.
Bernard Berenson
#29. Genius is the capacity for productive reaction against one's training.
Bernard Berenson
#30. We usually meet all of our relatives only at funerals where somebody always observes: "Too bad we can't get together more often".
Bernard Berenson
#31. Government is the art of the momentary feasible, of the least bad attainable, and not of the rationally most desirable.
Bernard Berenson
#32. I would I could stand on a busy corner, hat in hand, and beg people to throw me all their wasted hours.
Bernard Berenson
#33. A complete life may be one ending in so full identification with the non-self that there is no self to die.
Bernard Berenson
#34. The artist, depicting man disdainful of the storm and stress of life, is no less reconciling and healing than the poet who, while endowing Nature and Humanity, rejoices in its measureless superiority to human passions and human sorrows.
Bernard Berenson
#35. Enemies could become the best companions. Companionship is based on a common interest, and the greater the interest the closer the companionship. What makes enemies of people, if not the eagerness, the passion for the same thing?
Bernard Berenson
#36. The ultimate justification of the work of art is to help the spectator to become a work of art himself.
Bernard Berenson
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