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 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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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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[Describing his house:] It is a library with living rooms attached.
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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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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.
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Genius is the capacity for productive reaction against one’s training.
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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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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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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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Consistency requires you to be as ignorant today as you were a year ago.
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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.
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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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When everything else physical and mental seems to diminish, the appreciation of beauty is on the increase.
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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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Government is the art of the momentary feasible, of the least bad attainable, and not of the rationally most desirable.
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Miracles happen to those who believe in them. Otherwise why does not the Virgin Mary appear to Lamaists, Mohammedans, or Hindus who have never heard of her.
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I wonder whether art has a higher function than to make me feel, appreciate, and enjoy natural objects for their art value?
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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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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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We usually meet all of our relatives only at funerals where somebody always observes: “Too bad we can’t get together more often”.
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I am only a picture-taster, the way others are wine-or tea-tasters.
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One can repent even of having repented.
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You can parody and make fun of almost anything, but that does not turn the universe into a caricature.
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Taste begins when appetite is satisfied.
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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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Between truth and the search for it, I choose the second.
BERNARD BERENSON