Daily Inspiration Quote by Bernard Berenson

“Miracles” here isn’t a thunderbolt from heaven; it’s a verdict the mind delivers after the fact. Berenson, a connoisseur of Renaissance art and a lifelong judge of authenticity, knew how much of reality is mediated by trained expectation. In his world, the “miracle” is often the moment a painting “reveals” itself as a Titian or a Giorgione - an epiphany that feels sudden, almost mystical, but is built from priors: belief, attention, and the willingness to see coherence where others see noise.

The line has a double edge. On one level it flatters faith as a kind of engine: belief primes perception, perception shapes action, action raises the odds of outcomes we later narrate as extraordinary. You don’t stumble into a miracle; you behave as if one is possible, and that posture changes what you attempt, what you endure, what you notice. The subtext is practical, even faintly modern: cognition is not passive; it’s a filter and a producer.

But Berenson’s profession also makes the sentence slyly cautionary. Belief doesn’t just enable discovery; it can manufacture it. The same confidence that helps you recognize genius can also make you misattribute it - the art-market version of seeing saints in cloud formations. In the early 20th century, with Europe lurching through war and upheaval, “miracles” would have been in demand; Berenson’s formulation both comforts and indicts that hunger.

It works because it collapses spiritual drama into psychological mechanics without fully demystifying it. He leaves “miracles” intact as a feeling - while quietly relocating their origin inside the believer.