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

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

Deliberately Home Lying Myself
Not what man knows but what man feels, concerns art. All else is science.
BERNARD BERENSON

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

Caricature Doe Fun Parody
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

Happiness Humble Intelligence Jobs
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
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
Literature in its most comprehensive sense is the autobiography of humanity.
BERNARD BERENSON

Humanity Literature Writing
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
When everything else physical and mental seems to diminish, the appreciation of beauty is on the increase.
BERNARD BERENSON

Appreciate Appreciation Beauty
There are two futures, the future of desire and the future of fate, and man’s reason has never learnt to separate them.
BERNARD BERENSON

Destiny Fate Men
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 wonder whether art has a higher function than to make me feel, appreciate, and enjoy natural objects for their art value?
BERNARD BERENSON

Appreciate Art Enjoy Value Wonder
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
I would willingly stand at street corners, hat in hand, begging passerby to drop their unused minutes into it.
BERNARD BERENSON

Hands Life Minute Passerby Time Unused
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

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

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

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