Bernard Berenson Quotes (23 Quotes)


    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

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

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

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

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


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

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


    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.

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

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

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

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

    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.

    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.

    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

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

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


    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.

    All we really want is otherness, tossing from side to side, and greeting every toss with shouts of welcome, and of contempt for the previous toss

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


    More Bernard Berenson Quotations (Based on Topics)


    Life - Art - Government - Literature - Medicine & Medical - Humanity - Youth - Poets - Dreams - Music - Beauty - Mind - Hatred - Society & Civilization - English - Performance Arts - Cry - Miracles - Hope - View All Bernard Berenson Quotations

    Related Authors


    Titus Livius - Tacitus - Robert Conquest - Michel Foucault - Iris Chang - Herodotus - Henry Adams - Harold Acton - George Bancroft - Flavius Josephus


Authors (by First Name)

A - B - C - D - E - F - G - H - I - J - K - L - M
N - O - P - Q - R - S - T - U - V - W - X - Y - Z

Other Inspiring Sections