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 BERENSONAs 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.
More Bernard Berenson Quotes
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I would willingly stand at street corners, hat in hand, begging passerby to drop their unused minutes into it.
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You can parody and make fun of almost anything, but that does not turn the universe into a caricature.
BERNARD BERENSON -
Government is the art of the momentary feasible, of the least bad attainable, and not of the rationally most desirable.
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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.
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 -
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 -
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 -
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 -
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 are two futures, the future of desire and the future of fate, and man’s reason has never learnt to separate them.
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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.
BERNARD BERENSON -
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 -
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 -
Boast is always a cry of despair, except in the young it is a cry of hope.
BERNARD BERENSON -
Government lasts as long as the under-taxed can defend themselves against the over-taxed.
BERNARD BERENSON