Berenson Art Quotes & Sayings

The ultimate justification of the work of art is to help the spectator to become a work of art himself. — Bernard Berenson

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

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

The measure would set criminal penalties, the same as those that would apply if harm or death happened to the pregnant woman, for those who harm a fetus. — Ken Calvert

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

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

Be, beget, begone. — William, Saroyan

You can't be striving to please; you must be striving to get to the heart of the matter. — Vanessa Redgrave

Americans had to tie every radical aspiration into a puritanical knot. — Susie Bright

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

Turning off all the lights, I went into the bathroom and closed the door. I stood in the darkness before the mirror, my hand on the light switch. I forced myself to flick it on.
In the flood of light against white tile, the face and shoulders of a strange
a fierce, bald, very dark Negro
glared at me from the glass. He in no way resembled me.
The transformation was total and shocking. I had expected to see myself disguised, but this was something else. I was imprisoned in the flesh of an utter stranger, an unsympathetic one with whom I felt no kinship. All traces of the John Griffin I had been were wiped from existence. — John Howard Griffin

Theater is dangerously open to repetition. It's exciting when you hit on a new way. — Fiona Shaw

Not what man knows but what man feels, concerns art. All else is science. — Bernard Berenson

The tune here is an old-fashioned town-crowd melody
kind of like how the people from the town in The Music Man might sound if Harold Hill had brought an infant homosexual to town instead of wind instruments. — David Levithan