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

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

Appointed Confidence Leisure Use
Government lasts as long as the under-taxed can defend themselves against the over-taxed.
BERNARD BERENSON

Government Long Taxation
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

Healing Passion Sorrow Stress
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

Enemy Greater Interest Passion People
[Describing his house:] It is a library with living rooms attached.
BERNARD BERENSON

House Library Rooms
The ultimate justification of the work of art is to help the spectator to become a work of art himself.
BERNARD BERENSON

Art Helping Justification
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

Deliberately Home Lying Myself
Life has taught me that it is not for our faults that we are disliked and even hated, but for our qualities.
BERNARD BERENSON

Life Quality Taught
Government is the art of the momentary feasible, of the least bad attainable, and not of the rationally most desirable.
BERNARD BERENSON

Art Government Momentary
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

Affair People Way
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

Enchantment Movement Painting Source Space
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

Age Desire Excess
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

Childhood Dream Fatherhood
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

Country Degrees Giving Language Stones
A complete life may be one ending in so full an identification with the oneself that there is no self left to die.
BERNARD BERENSON

Aging Die May Self
I would I could stand on a busy corner, hat in hand, and beg people to throw me all their wasted hours.
BERNARD BERENSON

Carpe Die Hands Time

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

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

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