Clive Bell

Only reason can convince us of those three fundamental truths without a recognition of which there can be no effective liberty: that…

— Clive Bell

It is not by his mixing and choosing, but by the shapes of his colors, and the combination of those shapes, that…

— Clive Bell

“We have no other means of recognising a work of art than our feeling for it. The objects that provoke aesthetic emotion…

— Clive Bell

All sensitive people agree that there is a peculiar emotion provoked by works of art.

— Clive Bell

It would follow that 'significant form' was form behind which we catch a sense of ultimate reality.

— Clive Bell

“...a work of art is like a rose. A rose is not beautiful because it is like something else. Neither is a…

— Clive Bell

We all agree now - by 'we' I mean intelligent people under sixty - that a work of art is like a…

— Clive Bell

Cezanne is the Christopher Columbus of a new continent of form.

— Clive Bell

Civilized people can talk about anything. For them no subject is taboo.... In civilized societies there will be no intellectual bogeys at…

— Clive Bell

“you cannot imagine a boundary line without any content, or a content without a boundary line.”

— Clive Bell

“The representative element in a work of art may or may not be harmful; always it is irrelevant. For, to appreciate a…

— Clive Bell

A rose is the visible result of an infinitude of complicated goings on in the bosom of the earth and in the…

— Clive Bell

It is the mark of great art that its appeal is universal and eternal.............. Great art remains stable and unobscure because the…

— Clive Bell

Do not mistake a crowd of big wage earners for the leisure class.

— Clive Bell

Genius worship is the inevitable sign of an uncreative age.

— Clive Bell

I will try to account for the degree of my aesthetic emotion. That, I conceive, is the function of the critic.

— Clive Bell

Detail is the heart of realism, and the fatty degeneration of art.

— Clive Bell

Art and Religion are, then, two roads by which men escape from circumstance to ecstasy. Between aesthetic and religious rapture there is…

— Clive Bell

Let the artist have just enough to eat, and the tools of this trade: ask nothing of him. Materially make the life…

— Clive Bell

The representative element in a work of art may or may not be harmful, but it is always irrelevant. For to appreciate…

— Clive Bell

“I have been using art as a means to the emotions of life and reading into it the ideas of life.”

— Clive Bell

Comfort came in with the middle classes.

— Clive Bell

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

Art and religion are, then, two roads by which men escape from circumstance to ecstacy.

— Clive Bell

“The critic can affect my aesthetic theories only by affecting my aesthetic experience. All systems of aesthetics must be based on personal…

— Clive Bell