You can parody and make fun of almost anything, but that does not turn the universe into a caricature.
BERNARD BERENSONBetween truth and the search for it, I choose the second.
More Bernard Berenson Quotes
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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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Government is the art of the momentary feasible, of the least bad attainable, and not of the rationally most desirable.
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Consistency requires you to be as ignorant today as you were a year ago.
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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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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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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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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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One can repent even of having repented.
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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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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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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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When everything else physical and mental seems to diminish, the appreciation of beauty is on the increase.
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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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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 average European does not seem to feel free until he succeeds in enslaving and oppressing others.
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Not what man knows but what man feels, concerns art. All else is science.
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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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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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The ultimate justification of the work of art is to help the spectator to become a work of art himself.
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I am only a picture-taster, the way others are wine-or tea-tasters.
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Literature in its most comprehensive sense is the autobiography of humanity.
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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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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. 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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Life has taught me that it is not for our faults that we are disliked and even hated, but for our qualities.
BERNARD BERENSON