There are two futures, the future of desire and the future of fate, and man’s reason has never learnt to separate them.
BERNARD BERENSONThe 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.
More Bernard Berenson Quotes
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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 -
The average European does not seem to feel free until he succeeds in enslaving and oppressing others.
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 -
Government is the art of the momentary feasible, of the least bad attainable, and not of the rationally most desirable.
BERNARD BERENSON -
I would willingly stand at street corners, hat in hand, begging passerby to drop their unused minutes into it.
BERNARD BERENSON -
Boast is always a cry of despair, except in the young it is a cry of hope.
BERNARD BERENSON -
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 -
Who will free me from hurry, flurry, the feeling of a crowd pushing behind me, of being hustled and crushed?
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 -
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.
BERNARD BERENSON -
Art is mind and heart and touch as much and more than it is mere instrument, technique – without which however it cannot exist at all.
BERNARD BERENSON -
[Describing his house:] It is a library with living rooms attached.
BERNARD BERENSON -
You can parody and make fun of almost anything, but that does not turn the universe into a caricature.
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 -
Taste begins when appetite is satisfied.
BERNARD BERENSON