Consistency requires you to be as ignorant today as you were a year ago.
BERNARD BERENSONThere are two futures, the future of desire and the future of fate, and man’s reason has never learnt to separate them.
More Bernard Berenson Quotes
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Government lasts as long as the under-taxed can defend themselves against the over-taxed.
BERNARD BERENSON -
Life has taught me that it is not for our faults that we are disliked and even hated, but for our qualities.
BERNARD BERENSON -
I am only a picture-taster, the way others are wine-or tea-tasters.
BERNARD BERENSON -
Genius is the capacity for productive reaction against one’s training.
BERNARD BERENSON -
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 -
[Describing his house:] It is a library with living rooms attached.
BERNARD BERENSON -
I wonder whether art has a higher function than to make me feel, appreciate, and enjoy natural objects for their art value?
BERNARD BERENSON -
I would I could stand on a busy corner, hat in hand, and beg people to throw me all their wasted hours.
BERNARD BERENSON -
Between truth and the search for it, I choose the second.
BERNARD BERENSON -
Who will free me from hurry, flurry, the feeling of a crowd pushing behind me, of being hustled and crushed?
BERNARD BERENSON -
There was time for work, for play, for love, the confidence that if a task was not done at the appointed time, I easily could fit it into another hour. I used to take leisure for granted, as I did time itself.
BERNARD BERENSON -
The average European does not seem to feel free until he succeeds in enslaving and oppressing others.
BERNARD BERENSON -
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 -
Taste begins when appetite is satisfied.
BERNARD BERENSON -
Government is the art of the momentary feasible, of the least bad attainable, and not of the rationally most desirable.
BERNARD BERENSON