Bernard Berenson Quotes

Miracles happen to those who believe in them.

No artifact is a work of art if it does not help to humanize us. Without art...our world would have remained a jungle.

You can parody and make fun of almost anything, but that does not turn the universe into a caricature.

Consistency requires you to be as ignorant today as you were a year ago.

Psychoanalysts are not occupied with the minds of their patients; they do not believe in the mind but in a cerebral intestine.

A complete life may be one ending in so full an identification with the oneself that there is no self left to die.

I would I could stand on a busy corner, hat in hand, and beg people to throw me all their wasted hours.

Literature in its most comprehensive sense is the autobiography of humanity.

Boast is always a cry of despair, except in the young it is a cry of hope.

There are two futures, the future of desire and the future of fate, and man's reason has never learnt to separate them.

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.

I wonder whether art has a higher function than to make me feel, appreciate, and enjoy natural objects for their art value?

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.

I am only a picture-taster, the way others are wine-or tea-tasters.

Taste begins when appetite is satisfied.

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.

Genius is the capacity for productive reaction against one's training.

The ultimate justification of the work of art is to help the spectator to become a work of art himself.

When everything else physical and mental seems to diminish, the appreciation of beauty is on the increase.

From childhood on I have had the dream of life lived as a sacrament... the dream implied taking life ritually as something holy.

Life has taught me that it is not for our faults that we are disliked and even hated, but for our qualities.

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.

We usually meet all of our relatives only at funerals where somebody always observes: "Too bad we can't get together more often".

Miracles happen to those who believe in them. Otherwise why does not the Virgin Mary appear to Lamaists, Mohammedans, or Hindus who have never heard of her.

The average European does not seem to feel free until he succeeds in enslaving and oppressing others.

Government lasts as long as the under-taxed can defend themselves against the over-taxed.

I would willingly stand at street corners, hat in hand, begging passerby to drop their unused minutes into it.

Between truth and the search for it, I choose the second.

One can repent even of having repented.

Government is the art of the momentary feasible, of the least bad attainable, and not of the rationally most desirable.

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.

[Describing his house:] It is a library with living rooms attached.

Not what man knows but what man feels, concerns art. All else is science.

A complete life may be one ending in so full an identification with the not-self that there is no self left to die.

Governments last as long as the under-taxed can defend themselves against the over-taxed.

I wonder whether Art has a higher function than to make me feel appreciate and enjoy natural objects for their art value?

We define genius as the capacity for productive reaction against one's training.

The institution that had the greatest effect on Berenson's education was the Boston public library, the first in the country that allowed people to take books home to read them.

Governments last as long as the undertaxed can defend themselves against the overtaxed.

I wish I could stand on a busy corner hat in hand and beg people to throw me all their wasted hours.

A complete life may be one ending in so full identification with the non-self that there is no self to die.