Literature in its most comprehensive sense is the autobiography of humanity.
BERNARD BERENSONI 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.
More Bernard Berenson Quotes
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Life has taught me that it is not for our faults that we are disliked and even hated, but for our qualities.
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Taste begins when appetite is satisfied.
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When everything else physical and mental seems to diminish, the appreciation of beauty is on the increase.
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Government is the art of the momentary feasible, of the least bad attainable, and not of the rationally most desirable.
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The average European does not seem to feel free until he succeeds in enslaving and oppressing others.
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How can I regain even for a minute the feeling of ample leisure I had during my early, my creative years? Then I seldom felt fussed, or hurried.
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Who will free me from hurry, flurry, the feeling of a crowd pushing behind me, of being hustled and crushed?
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No artifact is a work of art if it does not help to humanize us. Without art…our world would have remained a jungle.
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Government lasts as long as the under-taxed can defend themselves against the over-taxed.
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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.
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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.
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[Describing his house:] It is a library with living rooms attached.
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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.
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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.
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I am only a picture-taster, the way others are wine-or tea-tasters.
BERNARD BERENSON