Bernard Berenson Quotes

All great art ... creates in the beholder not self-satisfacti on but wonder and awe. Its great liberation is to lift us out of ourselves.

It's clear on the one hand that an education enriches and informs a response to beauty, even makes it possible in esoteric cases. On the other hand, there's no question that someone with no musical education whatsoever might wander into a concert hall and be overwhelmed by the 'Beethoven Pastoral Symphony'.

I like music because it's the only invisible art form.

Beauty is first and foremost an emotion.

It is not sufficient to see and to know the beauty of a work. We must feel and be affected by it.

The beauty of art is that it allows you to slow down, and for a moment, things that once seemed unfamiliar become precious to you.

The object of art like every other product creates a public which is sensitive to art and enjoys beauty.

I don't know if it's art, but I know I like it.

Works of art are of an infinite solitude, and no means of approach is so useless as criticism. Only love can touch and hold them and be fair to them.

The arts especially address the idea of aesthetic experience. An aesthetic experience is one in which your senses are operating at their peak; when you’re present in the current moment; when you’re resonating with the excitement of this thing that you’re experiencing; when you are fully alive.

Thus art is not an object, it is an experience.

Appreciation of art is a moral erection, otherwise mere dilettantism.

Beauty plus pity -- that is the closest we can get to a definition of art.

To be full of joy when looking at an oeuvre is not a little thing.

The idea that music is art has been something we advocated for years. And yet it doesn't receive the same treatment as art in the sense of the value of what it is, especially nowadays when it's been devalued and diminished to almost the point that it has to be given away for free.

There is not a single true work of art that has not in the end added to the inner freedom insight and life of each person who has known and loved it.

When I look at great works of art or listen to inspired music, I sense intimate portraits of the specific times in which they were created.

Art is not a handicraft, it is the transmission of feeling the artist has experienced.

Art is all about the experience. I could say I don't really relate to opera, but then you watch Placido Domingo, and you go, 'Blimey, look at that.'

But when I was twelve years old I caught my first strong glimpse of one of the fundamental forces of existence, whose votary I was destined to be for life - namely, Beauty.

What is important, then, is not that the critic should possess a correct abstract definition of beauty for the intellect, but a certain kind of temperament, the power of being deeply moved by the presence of beautiful objects.

Art gives people a reason to be alive.

Music must take rank as the highest of the fine arts - as the one which, more than any other, ministers to the human spirit.

Art is the objectification of feeling.

In music, you feel a connection to the voice and think about the person behind it. In art that's secondary.