We usually meet all of our relatives only at funerals where somebody always observes: “Too bad we can’t get together more often”.
BERNARD BERENSONEnemies 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?
More Bernard Berenson Quotes
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From childhood on I have had the dream of life lived as a sacrament… the dream implied taking life ritually as something holy.
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[Describing his house:] It is a library with living rooms attached.
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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.
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Boast is always a cry of despair, except in the young it is a cry of hope.
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Government lasts as long as the under-taxed can defend themselves against the over-taxed.
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A complete life may be one ending in so full an identification with the oneself that there is no self left to die.
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Not what man knows but what man feels, concerns art. All else is science.
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I would I could stand on a busy corner, hat in hand, and beg people to throw me all their wasted hours.
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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.
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Consistency requires you to be as ignorant today as you were a year ago.
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The ultimate justification of the work of art is to help the spectator to become a work of art himself.
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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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Between truth and the search for it, I choose the second.
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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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Who will free me from hurry, flurry, the feeling of a crowd pushing behind me, of being hustled and crushed?
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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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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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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.
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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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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?
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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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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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Psychoanalysts are not occupied with the minds of their patients; they do not believe in the mind but in a cerebral intestine.
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I am only a picture-taster, the way others are wine-or tea-tasters.
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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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You can parody and make fun of almost anything, but that does not turn the universe into a caricature.
BERNARD BERENSON