Kenneth Clark
Opera, next to Gothic architecture, is one of the strangest inventions of Western man. It could not have been foreseen by any logical process.Collection: Architecture
I believe order is better than chaos, creation better than destruction. I prefer gentleness to violence, forgiveness to vendetta. On the whole I think that knowledge is preferable to ignorance, and I am sure that human sympathy is more valuable than ideology. I believe that in spite of the recent triumphs of science, men haven't changed much in the last two thousand years; and in consequence we must try to learn from history.Collection: Believe
A racist system inevitably destroys and damages human beings; it brutalizes and dehumanizes them, blacks and whites alike.Collection: Racist
Children who are treated as if they are uneducable almost invariably become uneducable.Collection: Children
We are part of a great whole. All living things are our brothers and sisters.Collection: Brother
Racial prejudices are indication of a disturbed and potentially unstable society.Collection: Prejudice
I believe that in spite of the recent triumphs of science, men haven't changed much in the last two thousand years; and in consequence we must still try to learn from history. History is ourselves.Collection: Believe
I believe in courtesy, the ritual by which we avoid hurting other people's feelings by satisfying our own egos.Collection: Hurt
We can destroy ourselves by cynicism and disillusion, just as effectively as by bombs.Collection: Motivational
Art...must do something more than give pleasure: it should relate to our own life so as to increase our energy of spirit.Collection: Art
Over and above the political, economic, sociological, and international implications of racial prejudices, their major significance is that they place unnecessary burdens upon human beings.Collection: Justice
I believe in the God-given genius of certain individuals, and I value a society that makes their existence possible.Collection: Believe
The recognized achievements of some Negroes, despite rigid racial barriers, indicate that society by its prejudices may be depriving itself of valuable contributions from many others. It is now doubtful whether America can afford the luxury of such a waste of human resources.Collection: Luxury
Few people can look at a painting longer than it takes to peel an orange and eat it.Collection: Orange
A lot of people you think you know you don't know until you find out you don't know then it may be too late to know.Collection: Thinking
Pride, like humility, is destroyed by one's insistence that he possesses it.Collection: Humility
The dark ghettos are social, political, educational and-above all-economic colonies. Their inhabitants are subject peoples, victims of the greed, cruelty, insensitivity, guilt, and fear of their masters.Collection: Educational
All color is no color.Collection: Color
No nude, however abstract, should fail to arouse in the spectator some vestige of erotic feeling... The desire to grasp and be united with another human is so fundamental a part of our nature that our judgement of what is known as 'pure form' is inevitably influenced by it, and one of the difficulties of the nude as a subject for art is that these instincts cannot be hidden.Collection: Art
The great artist takes what he needs.Collection: Artist
The nude gains its enduring value from the fact that it reconciles several contrary states. It takes the most sensual and immediately interesting object, the human body, and puts it out of reach of time and desire; it takes the most purely rational concept of which mankind is capable, mathematical order, and makes it a delight to the senses; and it takes the vague fears of the unknown and sweetens them by showing that the gods are like men and may be worshiped for their life-giving beauty rather than their death-dealing powers.Collection: Men
In time of war all countries behave equally badly, because the power of action is handed over to stupid and obstinate men.Collection: Country
Sweeping, confident articles on the future seem to me, intellectually, the most disreputable of all forms of public utterance.Collection: Utterance
The various parts of the body cannot be perceived as simple units and have no clear relationship to one another. In almost every detail the body is not the shape that art has led us to believe it should be.Collection: Art
The eye instinctively looks for analogies and amplifies them, so that a face imagined in the pattern of a wallpaper may become more vivid than a photograph.Collection: Eye
One musn't overrate the culture of what used to be called "top people" before the wars. They had charming manners, but they were as ignorant as swans.Collection: War
No nude, however abstract, should fail to arouse in the spectator some vestige of erotic feeling, even if it be only the faintest shadow - and if it does not do so it is bad art and false morals.Collection: Art
The Cathedrals were built to the glory of God; New York was built to the glory of Mammon.Collection: New York
It is often said that Leonardo drew so well because he knew about things; it is truer to say that he knew about things because he drew so well.Collection: Drawing
Almost all great painters in old age arrive at the same kind of broad, simplified style, as if they wanted to summarise the whole of their experience in a few strokes and blobs of colour.Collection: Style
Gargoyles were the complement to saints; Leonardo's caricatures were complementary to his untiring search for ideal beauty. And gargoyles were the expression of all the passions, the animal forces, the Caliban gruntings and groanings which are left in human nature when the divine has been poured away. Leonardo was less concerned than his Gothic predecessors with the ethereal parts of our nature, and so his caricatures, in their expression of passionate energy, merge imperceptibly into the heroic.Collection: Passion
Changes in the structure of society are not brought about solely by massive engines of doctrine. The first flash of insight which persuades human beings to change their basic assumptions is usually contained in a few phrases.Collection: Doctrine
The nude does not simply represent the body, but relates it, by analogy, to all structures that have become part of our imaginative experience.Collection: Beauty
Ruthless, greedy, tyrannical, disreputable... they have had one principle worth all the rest, the principle of delight!Collection: Principles
Only the bad artists of the nineteenth century were frightened by the invention of photography; the good ones all welcomed it and used it.Collection: Photography
A visual experience is vitalizing. Whereas to write great poetry, to draw continuously on one's inner life, is not merely exhausting, it is to keep alight a consuming fire.Collection: Writing
People sometimes tell me that they prefer barbarism to civilisation. I doubt if they have given it a long enough trial. Like the people of Alexandria, they are bored by civilisation; but all the evidence suggests that the boredom of barbarism is infinitely greater.Collection: Boredom
Devotion to the facts will always give the pleasures of recognition; adherence to the rules of design, the pleasures of order and certainty.Collection: Order
Our universe cannot even be stated symbolically. And this touches us all more directly than one might suppose. For example, artists, who have been very little influenced by social systems, have always responded instinctively to latent assumptions about the shape of the universe. The incomprehensibility of our new cosmos seems to me, ultimately, to be the reason for the chaos of modern art.Collection: Art
I wonder if a single thought that has helped forward the human spirit has ever been conceived or written down in an enormous room: except, perhaps, in the reading room of the British Museum.Collection: Reading
This became Delacroix 's theme: that the achievements of the spirit all that a great library contained were the result of a state of society so delicately balanced that at the least touch they would be crushed beneath an avalanche of pent-up animal forces.Collection: Animal
Great works of art can be produced in barbarous societies - in fact the very narrowness of primitive society gives their ornamental art a peculiar concentration and vitality. At some time in the ninth century one could have looked down the Seine and seen the prow of a Viking ship coming up the river. Looked at today in the British Museum, it is a powerful work of art; but to the mother of a family trying to settle down in her little hut, it would have seemed less agreeable - as menacing to her civilisation as the periscope of a nuclear submarine.Collection: Mother
The difference between what we see and a sheet of white paper with a few thin lines on it is very great. Yet this abstraction is one which we seem to have adopted almost instinctively at an early stage in our development, not only in Neolithic graffiti but in early Egyptian drawings. And in spite of its abstract character, the outline is responsive to the least tremor of sensibility.Collection: Character
Ruskin's much-derided moral theory of art was part of an attempt to show that this human activity, which we value so highly, engaged the whole of human personality. His insistence on the sanctity of nature was part of an attempt to develop Goethe's intuition that form cannot be put together in the mind by an additive process, but is to be deduced from the laws of growth in living organisms, and their resistance to the elements.Collection: Art
The illustrator is essentially a reporter: his subjects come from the outside, lit by a flash. A subject comes to the classical artist from inside, and when he discovers confirmation of it in the outside world he feels that it has been there all the time.Collection: Artist
Heroes do not easily tolerate the company of other heroes.Collection: Hero
You have no idea what portrait painters suffer from the vanity of their sitters.Collection: Vanity
All great civilisations, in their early stages, are based on success in war.Collection: Peace
To hurry through the rise and fall of a fine, full sentence is like defying the role of time in human life.Collection: Fall
Lives devoted to Beauty seldom end well.Collection: Ends