Bernard Berenson Quotes

Miracles happen to those who believe in them.

Life has taught me that it is not for our faults that we are disliked and even hated, but for our qualities.

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

The ultimate justification of the work of art is to help the spectator to become a work of art himself.

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

Taste begins when appetite is satisfied.

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 learnt to separate them.

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

Art, in the widest sense of the word, is the instrument Hellenism has used and would use for that purpose. All the arts, poetry, music, ritual, the visual arts, the theatre, must work singly and together to create the most comprehensive art of all, a humanized society, and its masterpiece, the free man.

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

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

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.

One can repent even of having repented.

It was a morning in early summer. A silver haze shimmered and trembled over the lime trees. The air was laden with their fragrance. The temperature was like a caress. I remember - I need not recall - that I climbed up a tree stump and felt suddenly immersed in Itness. I did not call it by that name. I had no need for words. It and I were one.

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

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?

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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