Bernard Berenson Quotes

34 quotes in 486 categories

• I would I could stand on a busy corner, hat in hand, and beg people to throw me all their wasted hours.
• When everything else physical and mental seems to diminish, the appreciation of beauty is on the increase.
• 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…
• 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…
• Consistency requires you to be as ignorant today as you were a year ago.
• Between truth and the search for it, I choose the second.
• Government lasts as long as the under-taxed can defend themselves against the over-taxed.
• Literature in its most comprehensive sense is the autobiography of humanity.
• 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…
• A complete life may be one ending in so full an identification with the oneself that there is no self left to die.
• Genius is the capacity for productive reaction against one's training.
• There are two futures, the future of desire and the future of fate, and man's reason has never learned to separate them.
• Life has taught me that it is not for our faults that we are disliked and even hated, but for our qualities.
• I am only a picture-taster, the way others are wine-or tea-tasters.
• 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…
• I would willingly stand at street corners, hat in hand, begging passerby to drop their unused minutes into it.
• From childhood on I have had the dream of life lived as a sacrament... the dream implied taking life ritually as something holy.
• The average European does not seem to feel free until he succeeds in enslaving and oppressing others.
• [Describing his house:] It is a library with living rooms attached.
• Boast is always a cry of despair, except in the young it is a cry of hope.

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