Clive Bell Quotes

23 quotes in 322 categories

• A rose is the visible result of an infinitude of complicated goings on in the bosom of the earth and in the air above, and…
• We all agree now - by 'we' I mean intelligent people under sixty - that a work of art is like a rose. A rose…
• The representative element in a work of art may or may not be harmful, but it is always irrelevant. For to appreciate a work of…
• Only reason can convince us of those three fundamental truths without a recognition of which there can be no effective liberty: that what we believe…
• It would follow that 'significant form' was form behind which we catch a sense of ultimate reality.
• Art and relligion are not professions: they are not occupations for which men can be paid. The artist and the saint do what they have…
• 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…
• It is the mark of great art that its appeal is universal and eternal.............. Great art remains stable and unobscure because the feelings that it…
• Do not mistake a crowd of big wage earners for the leisure class.
• I will try to account for the degree of my aesthetic emotion. That, I conceive, is the function of the critic.
• All sensitive people agree that there is a peculiar emotion provoked by works of art.
• Art and Religion are, then, two roads by which men escape from circumstance to ecstasy. Between aesthetic and religious rapture there is a family alliance.…
• Comfort came in with the middle classes.
• It is the mark of great art that its appeal is universal and eternal.
• The forms of art are inexhaustible; but all lead by the same road of aesthetic emotion to the same world of aesthetic ecstasy.
• There must be some one quality without which a work of art cannot exist; possessing which, in the least degree, no work is altogether worthless.
• We have no other means of recognising a work of art than our feeling for it.
• It is not by his mixing and choosing, but by the shapes of his colors, and the combination of those shapes, that we recognize the…
• Cezanne is the Christopher Columbus of a new continent of form.
• Detail is the heart of realism, and the fatty degeneration of art.

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