Genius is the capacity for productive reaction against one’s training.
BERNARD BERENSONI 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.
More Bernard Berenson Quotes
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Not what man knows but what man feels, concerns art. All else is science.
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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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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 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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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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[Describing his house:] It is a library with living rooms attached.
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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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Literature in its most comprehensive sense is the autobiography of humanity.
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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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You can parody and make fun of almost anything, but that does not turn the universe into a caricature.
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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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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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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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I am only a picture-taster, the way others are wine-or tea-tasters.
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Government lasts as long as the under-taxed can defend themselves against the over-taxed.
BERNARD BERENSON