Top 35 Bernard Berenson Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Miracles happen to those who believe in them.”

— Bernard Berenson

Featured in: Miracle Quotes

2. “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

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

— Bernard Berenson

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

— Bernard Berenson

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

— Bernard Berenson

6. “Literature in its most comprehensive sense is the autobiography of humanity.”

— Bernard Berenson

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

— Bernard Berenson

8. “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.”

— Bernard Berenson

9. “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.”

— Bernard Berenson

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

— Bernard Berenson

11. “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.”

— Bernard Berenson

12. “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.”

— Bernard Berenson

13. “Taste begins when appetite is satisfied.”

— Bernard Berenson

14. “There are two futures, the future of desire and the future of fate, and man’s reason has never learned to separate them.”

— Bernard Berenson

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

— Bernard Berenson

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

— Bernard Berenson

17. “Genius is the capacity for productive reaction against one’s training.”

— Bernard Berenson

18. “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.”

— Bernard Berenson

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

— Bernard Berenson

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

— Bernard Berenson

21. “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.”

— Bernard Berenson

22. “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?”

— Bernard Berenson

23. “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.”

— Bernard Berenson

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

— Bernard Berenson

25. “Consistency, commonly thought of as a good thing, requires you to be as ignorant today as you wre a year ago.”

— Bernard Berenson

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

— Bernard Berenson

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

— Bernard Berenson

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

— Bernard Berenson

29. “One can repent even of having repented.”

— Bernard Berenson

30. “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.”

— Bernard Berenson

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

— Bernard Berenson

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

— Bernard Berenson

Featured in: Fun Quotes

33. “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.”

— Bernard Berenson

34. “Give us this day our daily idea, and forgive us all those we thought yesterday.”

— Bernard Berenson

35. “The painter can accomplish his task only by giving tactile values to retinal impressions.”

— Bernard Berenson

36. “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.”

— Bernard Berenson