The starting-point for all systems of aesthetics must be the personal experience of a peculiar emotion. The objects that provoke this emotion… — Clive Bell Copy Share Image
What quality is shared by all objects that provoke our aesthetic emotions? Only one answer seems possible— significant form. In each, lines… — Clive Bell Copy Share Image
Only reason can convince us of those three fundamental truths without a recognition of which there can be no effective liberty: that what we… — Clive Bell Copy Share Image
It is not by his mixing and choosing, but by the shapes of his colors, and the combination of those shapes, that we recognize… — Clive Bell Copy Share Image
“We have no other means of recognising a work of art than our feeling for it. The objects that provoke aesthetic emotion vary with… — Clive Bell Copy Share Image
All sensitive people agree that there is a peculiar emotion provoked by works of art. — Clive Bell Copy Share Image
It would follow that 'significant form' was form behind which we catch a sense of ultimate reality. — Clive Bell Copy Share Image
“...a work of art is like a rose. A rose is not beautiful because it is like something else. Neither is a work of… — Clive Bell Copy Share Image
We all agree now - by 'we' I mean intelligent people under sixty - that a work of art is like a rose. A… — Clive Bell Copy Share Image
Civilized people can talk about anything. For them no subject is taboo.... In civilized societies there will be no intellectual bogeys at sight of… — Clive Bell Copy Share Image
“you cannot imagine a boundary line without any content, or a content without a boundary line.” — Clive Bell Copy Share Image
“The representative element in a work of art may or may not be harmful; always it is irrelevant. For, to appreciate a work of… — Clive Bell Copy Share Image
A rose is the visible result of an infinitude of complicated goings on in the bosom of the earth and in the air above,… — Clive Bell Copy Share Image
