Bernard Berenson Quotes

Enemies could become the best companions. Companionship is based on a common interest, and the greater the interest the closer the companionship. What makes enemies of people, if not the eagerness, the passion for the same thing?
BERNARD BERENSON

Enemy Greater Interest Passion People
Taste begins when appetite is satisfied.
BERNARD BERENSON

Appetite Satisfied Taste
Consistency requires you to be as ignorant today as you were a year ago.
BERNARD BERENSON

Creativity Ignorance Inspirational
Government is the art of the momentary feasible, of the least bad attainable, and not of the rationally most desirable.
BERNARD BERENSON

Art Government Momentary
[Describing his house:] It is a library with living rooms attached.
BERNARD BERENSON

House Library Rooms
Genius is the capacity for productive reaction against one’s training.
BERNARD BERENSON

Genius Reaction Training
Miracles happen to those who believe in them.
BERNARD BERENSON

Believe Optimistic Positive
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
Boast is always a cry of despair, except in the young it is a cry of hope.
BERNARD BERENSON

Boast Cry Despair Hope
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
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
Government lasts as long as the under-taxed can defend themselves against the over-taxed.
BERNARD BERENSON

Government Long Taxation
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
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
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
Literature in its most comprehensive sense is the autobiography of humanity.
BERNARD BERENSON

Humanity Literature Writing
Between truth and the search for it, I choose the second.
BERNARD BERENSON

Comparison History Truth
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
When everything else physical and mental seems to diminish, the appreciation of beauty is on the increase.
BERNARD BERENSON

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

Taster Tea Way Wine
The average European does not seem to feel free until he succeeds in enslaving and oppressing others.
BERNARD BERENSON

Average Country Feel Oppressing
Life has taught me that it is not for our faults that we are disliked and even hated, but for our qualities.
BERNARD BERENSON

Life Quality Taught
Not what man knows but what man feels, concerns art. All else is science.
BERNARD BERENSON

Art Concern 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
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.
BERNARD BERENSON

Appear Believe Fear Mary Prayer
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

Other Famous Personalities