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 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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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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Taste begins when appetite is satisfied.
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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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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.
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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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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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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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You can parody and make fun of almost anything, but that does not turn the universe into a caricature.
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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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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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One can repent even of having repented.
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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.
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I am only a picture-taster, the way others are wine-or tea-tasters.
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Not what man knows but what man feels, concerns art. All else is science.
BERNARD BERENSON