Bernard Berenson Quotes - Page 2

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.

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

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

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

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.

Government is the art of the momentary feasible, of the least bad attainable, and not of the rationally most desirable.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

We usually meet all of our relatives only at funerals where somebody always observes: "Too bad we can't get together more often".

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.