The starting-point for all systems of aesthetics must be the personal experience of a peculiar emotion. The objects that provoke this emotion we call works of art. — 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 and colors combined in a particular way; certain forms and relations of forms, stir our aesthetic emotions. These… — 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
