Bernard Berenson famous quotes

Miracles happen to those who believe in them.
-- Bernard Berenson

#Positive #Believe #Miracle

Consistency requires you to be as ignorant today as you were a year ago.
-- Bernard Berenson

#Creativity #Years #Consistency

I would I could stand on a busy corner, hat in hand, and beg people to throw me all their wasted hours.
-- Bernard Berenson

#Time #Carpe Diem #Hands

Genius is the capacity for productive reaction against one's training.
-- Bernard Berenson

#Training #Genius #Reactions

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

#Happiness #Jobs #Humble

You can parody and make fun of almost anything, but that does not turn the universe into a caricature.
-- Bernard Berenson

#Fun #Doe #Parody

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

#Wine #Tea #Way

Pessimism like calumny is easy to do, and attracts immediate attention. The gossiper and the writer may find this out soon enough, and a little encouragement from the current mood will procure them successes that bring endless imitators in their trail. On the other hand saying good things about life in general and individuals in particular and making it interesting is a serious task which few can achieve with credit.
-- Bernard Berenson

#Encouragement #Hands #Interesting

Who will free me from hurry, flurry, the feeling of a crowd pushing behind me, of being hustled and crushed? 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. 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

#Years #Play #Creative

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

#Self #May #Aging

I walk in the garden, I look at the flowers and shrubs and trees and discover in them an exquisiteness of contour, a vitality of edge, or a vigour of spring, as well as an infinite variety of colour that no artefact I have seen in the last sixty years can rival...each day, as I look, I wonder where my eyes were yesterday.
-- Bernard Berenson

#Spring #Flower #Eye

Literature in its most comprehensive sense is the autobiography of humanity.
-- Bernard Berenson

#Writing #Humanity #Literature

Government lasts as long as the under-taxed can defend themselves against the over-taxed.
-- Bernard Berenson

#Government #Long #Lasts

When everything else physical and mental seems to diminish, the appreciation of beauty is on the increase.
-- Bernard Berenson

#Beauty #Appreciation #Appreciate

Between truth and the search for it, I choose the second.
-- Bernard Berenson

#History #Comparison

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

#Desire #Excess #Youth

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

#Prayer #Believe #Miracle

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 #Mind #Patient

Not what man knows but what man feels, concerns art. All else is science.
-- Bernard Berenson

#Art #Men #Concern

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

#Passion #People #Enemy

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

#Stress #Healing #Passion

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

#Space #Enchantment #Movement

Taste begins when appetite is satisfied.
-- Bernard Berenson

#Taste #Appetite #Satisfied

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

#Lying #Home #Would Be

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

#People #Way #Affair

I wonder whether art has a higher function than to make me feel, appreciate, and enjoy natural objects for their art value?
-- Bernard Berenson

#Art #Appreciate #Wonder

There are two futures, the future of desire and the future of fate, and man's reason has never learned to separate them.
-- Bernard Berenson

#Fate #Men #Two

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

All of the arts, poetry, music, ritual, the visible arts, the theater, must singly and together create the most comprehensive art of all, a humanized society, and its masterpiece, free man
-- Bernard Berenson

#Art #Men #Together

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

#Dream #Childhood #Fatherhood

The average European does not seem to feel free until he succeeds in enslaving and oppressing others.
-- Bernard Berenson

#Europe #Average #Succeed

[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

#Hope #Despair #Cry

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 would willingly stand at street corners, hat in hand, begging passerby to drop their unused minutes into it.
-- Bernard Berenson

#Life #Time #Hands