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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.

Bernard Berenson

Life has taught me that it is not for our faults that we are disliked and even hated, but for our qualities.
BERNARD BERENSON

Life Quality Taught
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.
BERNARD BERENSON

Appointed Confidence Leisure Use
I would I could stand on a busy corner, hat in hand, and beg people to throw me all their wasted hours.
BERNARD BERENSON

Carpe Die Hands Time
One can repent even of having repented.
BERNARD BERENSON

Even Happen One Repent
I am only a picture-taster, the way others are wine-or tea-tasters.
BERNARD BERENSON

Taster Tea Way Wine
You can parody and make fun of almost anything, but that does not turn the universe into a caricature.
BERNARD BERENSON

Caricature Doe Fun Parody
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

Childhood Dream Fatherhood
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

Age Desire Excess
I wonder whether art has a higher function than to make me feel, appreciate, and enjoy natural objects for their art value?
BERNARD BERENSON

Appreciate Art Enjoy Value Wonder
We usually meet all of our relatives only at funerals where somebody always observes: “Too bad we can’t get together more often”.
BERNARD BERENSON

Funeral Get Together
The ultimate justification of the work of art is to help the spectator to become a work of art himself.
BERNARD BERENSON

Art Helping Justification
Who will free me from hurry, flurry, the feeling of a crowd pushing behind me, of being hustled and crushed?
BERNARD BERENSON

Creative Feeling Free Play Years
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.
BERNARD BERENSON

Deliberately Home Lying Myself
Government lasts as long as the under-taxed can defend themselves against the over-taxed.
BERNARD BERENSON

Government Long Taxation
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.
BERNARD BERENSON

Healing Passion Sorrow Stress
Taste begins when appetite is satisfied.
BERNARD BERENSON

Appetite Satisfied Taste
I would willingly stand at street corners, hat in hand, begging passerby to drop their unused minutes into it.
BERNARD BERENSON

Hands Life Minute Passerby Time Unused
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.
BERNARD BERENSON

Country Degrees Giving Language Stones
Boast is always a cry of despair, except in the young it is a cry of hope.
BERNARD BERENSON

Boast Cry Despair Hope
Not what man knows but what man feels, concerns art. All else is science.
BERNARD BERENSON

Art Concern Men
Consistency requires you to be as ignorant today as you were a year ago.
BERNARD BERENSON

Creativity Ignorance Inspirational
A complete life may be one ending in so full an identification with the oneself that there is no self left to die.
BERNARD BERENSON

Aging Die May Self
Psychoanalysts are not occupied with the minds of their patients; they do not believe in the mind but in a cerebral intestine.
BERNARD BERENSON

Believe Intestine Mind Patient
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

Art Jungle Our Remained World
When everything else physical and mental seems to diminish, the appreciation of beauty is on the increase.
BERNARD BERENSON

Appreciate Appreciation Beauty
Government is the art of the momentary feasible, of the least bad attainable, and not of the rationally most desirable.
BERNARD BERENSON

Art Government Momentary
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.
BERNARD BERENSON

Affair People Way

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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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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