The ultimate justification of the work of art is to help the spectator to become a work of art himself.
BERNARD BERENSONTaste begins when appetite is satisfied.
More Bernard Berenson Quotes
-
-
[Describing his house:] It is a library with living rooms attached.
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 -
I wonder whether art has a higher function than to make me feel, appreciate, and enjoy natural objects for their art value?
BERNARD BERENSON -
We usually meet all of our relatives only at funerals where somebody always observes: “Too bad we can’t get together more often”.
BERNARD BERENSON -
The average European does not seem to feel free until he succeeds in enslaving and oppressing others.
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 -
Between truth and the search for it, I choose the second.
BERNARD BERENSON -
One can repent even of having repented.
BERNARD BERENSON -
You can parody and make fun of almost anything, but that does not turn the universe into a caricature.
BERNARD BERENSON -
Boast is always a cry of despair, except in the young it is a cry of hope.
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 -
Consistency requires you to be as ignorant today as you were a year ago.
BERNARD BERENSON -
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 -
Life has taught me that it is not for our faults that we are disliked and even hated, but for our qualities.
BERNARD BERENSON -
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