Daily Inspiration Quote by Bernard Berenson

Berenson’s line is a small act of heresy dressed up as humility. Choosing “the search” over “truth” dodges the grand, marble-statue certainty that historians are often expected to deliver. It’s also a quiet boast: the search is where expertise lives. Anyone can claim to possess truth; only the disciplined can keep revising their map as new evidence arrives, old certainties rot, and fashionable theories get exposed.

The phrasing matters. “Between” sets up a false simplicity, as if truth and inquiry are rivals rather than partners. Berenson knows they’re entangled, which is the point: “truth” is treated as a trophy, while “the search” is framed as a practice, almost an ethic. The subtext is anti-dogmatic and, in the 20th century, quietly political. Berenson lived through eras that made “Truth” a propaganda instrument: nationalism, total war, ideological absolutism. In that climate, insisting on process over proclamation becomes a moral stance.

There’s also an art-historical sting in it. Berenson helped shape connoisseurship, a field built on attribution, judgment, and the perpetual risk of being wrong. A single “true” identification can be overturned by a letter, a pigment test, a forgery revealed. By preferring the search, he protects the historian’s credibility: fallibility is not a flaw but the operating system.

It works because it flatters skepticism without surrendering to cynicism. He’s not saying truth is unreachable; he’s saying the only honest way to approach it is to keep moving.