There are two futures, the future of desire and the future of fate, and man’s reason has never learnt to separate them.
BERNARD BERENSONGovernment lasts as long as the under-taxed can defend themselves against the over-taxed.
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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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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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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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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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 -
I am only a picture-taster, the way others are wine-or tea-tasters.
BERNARD BERENSON -
Miracles happen to those who believe in them.
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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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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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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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Who will free me from hurry, flurry, the feeling of a crowd pushing behind me, of being hustled and crushed?
BERNARD BERENSON -
Genius is the capacity for productive reaction against one’s training.
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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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Life has taught me that it is not for our faults that we are disliked and even hated, but for our qualities.
BERNARD BERENSON