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[Describing his house:] It is a library with living rooms attached.

Bernard Berenson

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

Taster Tea Way Wine
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
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
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
Genius is the capacity for productive reaction against one’s training.
BERNARD BERENSON

Genius Reaction Training
Between truth and the search for it, I choose the second.
BERNARD BERENSON

Comparison History Truth
Taste begins when appetite is satisfied.
BERNARD BERENSON

Appetite Satisfied Taste
One can repent even of having repented.
BERNARD BERENSON

Even Happen One Repent
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
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
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
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
Literature in its most comprehensive sense is the autobiography of humanity.
BERNARD BERENSON

Humanity Literature Writing
[Describing his house:] It is a library with living rooms attached.
BERNARD BERENSON

House Library Rooms
Boast is always a cry of despair, except in the young it is a cry of hope.
BERNARD BERENSON

Boast Cry Despair Hope
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
There are two futures, the future of desire and the future of fate, and man’s reason has never learnt to separate them.
BERNARD BERENSON

Destiny Fate Men
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
The average European does not seem to feel free until he succeeds in enslaving and oppressing others.
BERNARD BERENSON

Average Country Feel Oppressing
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
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
Not what man knows but what man feels, concerns art. All else is science.
BERNARD BERENSON

Art Concern Men
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

During Early Fussed Hurried Minute
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
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
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

[Describing his house:] It is a library with living rooms attached.

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[Describing his house:] It is a library with living rooms attached.

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