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 BERENSONAs 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.
More Bernard Berenson Quotes
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Boast is always a cry of despair, except in the young it is a cry of hope.
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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.
BERNARD BERENSON -
You can parody and make fun of almost anything, but that does not turn the universe into a caricature.
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[Describing his house:] It is a library with living rooms attached.
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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.
BERNARD BERENSON -
I am only a picture-taster, the way others are wine-or tea-tasters.
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The ultimate justification of the work of art is to help the spectator to become a work of art himself.
BERNARD BERENSON -
The average European does not seem to feel free until he succeeds in enslaving and oppressing others.
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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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Government is the art of the momentary feasible, of the least bad attainable, and not of the rationally most desirable.
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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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One can repent even of having repented.
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Literature in its most comprehensive sense is the autobiography of humanity.
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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.
BERNARD BERENSON







