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 BERENSONGerman 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.
More Bernard Berenson Quotes
-
-
I would willingly stand at street corners, hat in hand, begging passerby to drop their unused minutes into it.
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 -
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 -
Consistency requires you to be as ignorant today as you were a year ago.
BERNARD BERENSON -
Literature in its most comprehensive sense is the autobiography of humanity.
BERNARD BERENSON -
I wonder whether art has a higher function than to make me feel, appreciate, and enjoy natural objects for their art value?
BERNARD BERENSON -
Taste begins when appetite is satisfied.
BERNARD BERENSON -
You can parody and make fun of almost anything, but that does not turn the universe into a caricature.
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 -
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 -
Miracles happen to those who believe in them.
BERNARD BERENSON -
Between truth and the search for it, I choose the second.
BERNARD BERENSON -
Boast is always a cry of despair, except in the young it is a cry of hope.
BERNARD BERENSON -
Genius is the capacity for productive reaction against one’s training.
BERNARD BERENSON