Bernard Berenson Quotes

Consistency, commonly thought of as a good thing, requires you to be as ignorant today as you wre a year ago.

From childhood on I have had the dream of life lived as a sacrament ... the dream implied taking life ritually as something holy.

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.

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

Boast is always a cry of despair, except in the young it is a cry of hope.

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

One can repent even of having repented.

The Renaissance had resulted in the emancipation of the individual, in making him feel that the universe had no other purpose than his happiness. This brought an entirely new answer to the question, 'Why should I do this or that?' It used to be, 'Because self-instituted authority command you.' The answer now was, 'Because it is good for men.' In this lies our greatest debt to the Renaissance, that it instituted the welfare of men as the end of all action.

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

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.

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?

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

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

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

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

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

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.

Psychoanalysts are not occupied with the minds of their patients; they do not believe in the mind but in a cerebral intestine.

A complete life may be one ending in so full identification with the non-self that there is no self to die.

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

No artifact is a work of art if it does not help to humanize us. Without art ... our world would have remained a jungle.

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.

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.