Bernard Berenson Quotes

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.

Instead, it appears to be a particular mark of beauty that it is considered with tranquil satisfaction; that it pleases if we also do not possess it and we are still far removed from demanding to possess it.

Beauty, whether moral or natural, is felt, more properly than perceived.

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'.

Beauty is first and foremost an emotion.

The thought came to me that all one loves in art becomes beautiful. Beauty is nothing but the expression of the fact that something is being loved. Only thus could she be defined.

The understanding of art depends finally upon one's willingness to extend one's humanity and one's knowledge of human life.

I think the sensation of being moved by a piece of art is something that is really good for a person's soul.

You know you are an artist if you appreciate beauty.

The goal of art is to inspire people to look inward.

The critics could never mortify me out of heart - because I love poetry for its own sake, - and, tho' with no stoicism and some ambition, care more for my poems than for my poetic reputation.

Since I have known God in a saving manner, painting, poetry, and music have had charms unknown to me before. I have received what I suppose is a taste for them, or religion has refined my mind and made it susceptible of impressions from the sublime and beautiful. O, how religion secures the heightened enjoyment of those pleasures which keep so many from God, by their becoming a source of pride!

There is a road from the eye to the heart that does not go through the intellect. Men do not quarrel about the meaning of sunsets; they never dispute that the hawthorn says the best and wittiest thing about the spring.

It's been a growth process for each of us to understand why we find certain things beautiful. And if we do find something beautiful, we'll chase it, because you want to understand yourself and what your psyche is creating.

It was the sort of beauty you feel so deeply it becomes contagious and somehow makes you feel beautiful too.

You need the art in order to love the life.

You do not need to know anything about a plant to know that it is beautiful.

To cultivate sympathy you must be among living creatures, and thinking about them; and to cultivate admiration, you must be among beautiful things and looking at them.

I am not sure that the discovery of love is necessarily more exquisite than the discovery of poetry.

Our ability to perceive quality in nature begins, as in art, with the pretty.

What we seek, at the deepest level, is inwardly to resemble, rather than physically to possess, the objects and places that touch us through their beauty.

When you see beauty anywhere, it's a reflection of yourself.

The goal of life is rapture. Art is the way we experience it.

The contemplation of beauty in nature, in art, in literature, in human character, diffuses through our being a soothing and subtle joy, by which the heart's anxious and aching cares are softly smiled away.