Quotes from Bernard Berenson

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.

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

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?

We define genius as the capacity for productive reaction against one's training.

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

Governments last as long as the under-taxed can defend themselves against the over-taxed.

There are two futures, the future of desire and the future of fate, and man's reason has never learnt to separate them.

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

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.

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

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