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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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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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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I would willingly stand at street corners, hat in hand, begging passerby to drop their unused minutes into it.
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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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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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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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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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The ultimate justification of the work of art is to help the spectator to become a work of art himself.
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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 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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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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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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Government lasts as long as the under-taxed can defend themselves against the over-taxed.
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Miracles happen to those who believe in 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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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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Taste begins when appetite is satisfied.
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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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[Describing his house:] It is a library with living rooms attached.
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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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When everything else physical and mental seems to diminish, the appreciation of beauty is on the increase.
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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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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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The average European does not seem to feel free until he succeeds in enslaving and oppressing others.
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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.
BERNARD BERENSON