Boast is always a cry of despair, except in the young it is a cry of hope.
BERNARD BERENSONGovernment is the art of the momentary feasible, of the least bad attainable, and not of the rationally most desirable.
More Bernard Berenson Quotes
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[Describing his house:] It is a library with living rooms attached.
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When everything else physical and mental seems to diminish, the appreciation of beauty is on the increase.
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No artifact is a work of art if it does not help to humanize us. Without art…our world would have remained a jungle.
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Miracles happen to those who believe in them. Otherwise why does not the Virgin Mary appear to Lamaists, Mohammedans, or Hindus who have never heard of her.
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You can parody and make fun of almost anything, but that does not turn the universe into a caricature.
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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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The average European does not seem to feel free until he succeeds in enslaving and oppressing others.
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Government is the art of the momentary feasible, of the least bad attainable, and not of the rationally most desirable.
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Genius is the capacity for productive reaction against one’s training.
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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.
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Not what man knows but what man feels, concerns art. All else is science.
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Consistency requires you to be as ignorant today as you were a year ago.
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Literature in its most comprehensive sense is the autobiography of humanity.
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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.
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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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I wonder whether art has a higher function than to make me feel, appreciate, and enjoy natural objects for their art value?
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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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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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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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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.
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I would I could stand on a busy corner, hat in hand, and beg people to throw me all their wasted hours.
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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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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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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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One can repent even of having repented.
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I am only a picture-taster, the way others are wine-or tea-tasters.
BERNARD BERENSON