I am only a picture-taster, the way others are wine-or tea-tasters.
BERNARD BERENSONFrom childhood on I have had the dream of life lived as a sacrament… the dream implied taking life ritually as something holy.
More Bernard Berenson Quotes
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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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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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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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Not what man knows but what man feels, concerns art. All else is science.
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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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Literature in its most comprehensive sense is the autobiography of humanity.
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One can repent even of having repented.
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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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[Describing his house:] It is a library with living rooms attached.
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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.
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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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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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Genius is the capacity for productive reaction against one’s training.
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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.
BERNARD BERENSON