I wonder whether art has a higher function than to make me feel, appreciate, and enjoy natural objects for their art value?
BERNARD BERENSONWe usually meet all of our relatives only at funerals where somebody always observes: “Too bad we can’t get together more often”.
More Bernard Berenson Quotes
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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.
BERNARD BERENSON -
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.
BERNARD BERENSON -
You can parody and make fun of almost anything, but that does not turn the universe into a caricature.
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 -
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 -
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 -
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 -
I would willingly stand at street corners, hat in hand, begging passerby to drop their unused minutes into it.
BERNARD BERENSON -
Literature in its most comprehensive sense is the autobiography of humanity.
BERNARD BERENSON -
Who will free me from hurry, flurry, the feeling of a crowd pushing behind me, of being hustled and crushed?
BERNARD BERENSON -
One can repent even of having repented.
BERNARD BERENSON -
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 -
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 -
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.
BERNARD BERENSON -
Government is the art of the momentary feasible, of the least bad attainable, and not of the rationally most desirable.
BERNARD BERENSON -
Between truth and the search for it, I choose the second.
BERNARD BERENSON -
Psychoanalysts are not occupied with the minds of their patients; they do not believe in the mind but in a cerebral intestine.
BERNARD BERENSON -
Government lasts as long as the under-taxed can defend themselves against the over-taxed.
BERNARD BERENSON -
Boast is always a cry of despair, except in the young it is a cry of hope.
BERNARD BERENSON -
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.
BERNARD BERENSON -
Genius is the capacity for productive reaction against one’s training.
BERNARD BERENSON -
I am only a picture-taster, the way others are wine-or tea-tasters.
BERNARD BERENSON -
The average European does not seem to feel free until he succeeds in enslaving and oppressing others.
BERNARD BERENSON -
I would I could stand on a busy corner, hat in hand, and beg people to throw me all their wasted hours.
BERNARD BERENSON -
Not what man knows but what man feels, concerns art. All else is science.
BERNARD BERENSON -
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