Kenneth Clark Short Quotes

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Heroes do not easily tolerate the company of other heroes.

Kenneth Clark
All great civilisations, in their early stages, are based on success in war.

Kenneth Clark
Pride, like humility, is destroyed by one's insistence that he possesses it.

Kenneth Clark
Leonardo is the Hamlet of art history whom each of us must recreate for himself.

Kenneth Clark
Children who are treated as if they are uneducable almost invariably become uneducable.

Kenneth Clark
The Cathedrals were built to the glory of God; New York was built to the glory of Mammon.

Kenneth Clark
I believe in courtesy, the ritual by which we avoid hurting other people's feelings by satisfying our own egos.

Kenneth Clark
I believe in the God-given genius of certain individuals, and I value a society that makes their existence possible.

Kenneth Clark
In time of war all countries behave equally badly, because the power of action is handed over to stupid and obstinate men.

Kenneth Clark
Sweeping, confident articles on the future seem to me, intellectually, the most disreputable of all forms of public utterance.

Kenneth Clark
Conventional nudes based on classical originals could bear no burden of thought or inner life without losing their formal completeness.

Kenneth Clark
Devotion to the facts will always give the pleasures of recognition; adherence to the rules of design, the pleasures of order and certainty.

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.

Kenneth Clark
The nude does not simply represent the body, but relates it, by analogy, to all structures that have become part of our imaginative experience.

Kenneth Clark
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.

Kenneth Clark
His long struggle with physical passion was almost over, and, as with many other great sensualists, its place had been taken by an obsession with death.

Kenneth Clark
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.

Kenneth Clark
It is lack of confidence, more than anything else, that kills a civilisation. We can destroy ourselves by cynicism and disillusion, just as effectively as by bombs.

Kenneth Clark
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.

Kenneth Clark
Energy is eternal delight; and from the earliest times human beings have tried to imprison it in some durable hieroglyphic. It is perhaps the first of all the subjects of art.

Kenneth Clark
As for the Messiah, it is, like Michelangelo's Creation of Adam, one of those rare works that appeal immediately to everyone, and yet is indisputably a masterpiece of the highest order.

Kenneth Clark
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.

Kenneth Clark
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.

Kenneth Clark
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.

Kenneth Clark
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.

Kenneth Clark
Those who wish, in the interest of morality, to reduce Leonardo, that inexhaustible source of creative power, to a neutral or sexless agency, have a strange idea of doing service to his reputation.

Kenneth Clark