Bernard Berenson quotes

Consistency requires you to be as ignorant today as you were a year ago. (Bernard Berenson)
Taste begins when appetite is satisfied.
Bernard Berenson
I would I could stand on a busy corner, hat in hand, and beg people to throw me all their wasted hours.
Bernard Berenson
Miracles happen to those who believe in them.
Bernard Berenson
Boast is always a cry of despair, except in the young it is a cry of hope.
Bernard Berenson
When everything else physical and mental seems to diminish, the appreciation of beauty is on the increase.
Bernard Berenson
Genius is the capacity for productive reaction against one's training.
Bernard Berenson
Life has taught me that it is not for our faults that we are disliked and even hated, but for our qualities.
Bernard Berenson
A complete life may be one ending in so full an identification with the oneself that there is no self left to die.
Bernard Berenson
Between truth and the search for it, I choose the second.
Bernard Berenson
From childhood on I have had the dream of life lived as a sacrament... the dream implied taking life ritually as something holy. (Bernard Berenson)
You can parody and make fun of almost anything, but that does not turn the universe into a caricature.
Bernard Berenson
The average European does not seem to feel free until he succeeds in enslaving and oppressing others.
Bernard Berenson
Psychoanalysts are not occupied with the minds of their patients; they do not believe in the mind but in a cerebral intestine.
Bernard Berenson
Florentine painting between Giotto and Michelangelo contains the names of such artists as Orcagna, Masaccio, Fra Filippo, Pollaiuolo, Verrocchio, Leonardo, and Botticelli. ... Forget that they were painters, they remain great sculptors; forget that they were sculptors, and still they remain architects, poets, and even men of science.
Bernard Berenson