Bernard Berenson quotes

Bernard Berenson was an American art historian and critic, renowned for his expertise in Renaissance art. His scholarship and connoisseurship greatly influenced the field of art attribution and collecting. He became a leading authority on Italian painting and advised major collectors around the world. Here are 15 of his quotes:

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

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