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Few people can look at a painting longer than it takes to peel an orange and eat it.

Kenneth Clark

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Kenneth Clark
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More quotes by Kenneth Clark

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Evidently one cannot look for long at the Last Supper without ceasing to study it as a composition, and beginning to speak of it as a drama. It is the most literary of all great pictures, one of the few of which the effect may largely be conveyed - can even be enhanced - by description.
Kenneth Clark
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I just don't think the moon is going to be an adequate substitute for the fact that we haven't addressed ourselves to clearing up the slums.
Kenneth Clark
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Racial prejudices are indication of a disturbed and potentially unstable society.
Kenneth Clark
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The illustrator is essentially a reporter: his subjects come from the outside, lit by a flash. A subject comes to the classical artist from inside, and when he discovers confirmation of it in the outside world he feels that it has been there all the time.
Kenneth Clark
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The various parts of the body cannot be perceived as simple units and have no clear relationship to one another. In almost every detail the body is not the shape that art has led us to believe it should be.
Kenneth Clark
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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
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Conventional nudes based on classical originals could bear no burden of thought or inner life without losing their formal completeness.
Kenneth Clark
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Only the bad artists of the nineteenth century were frightened by the invention of photography the good ones all welcomed it and used it.
Kenneth Clark
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Children who are treated as if they are uneducable almost invariably become uneducable.
Kenneth Clark
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To hurry through the rise and fall of a fine, full sentence is like defying the role of time in human life.
Kenneth Clark
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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
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The great achievement of the Catholic Church lay in harmonizing, civilizing the deepest impulses of ordinary, ignorant people.
Kenneth Clark
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I believe in the God-given genius of certain individuals, and I value a society that makes their existence possible.
Kenneth Clark
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Art...must do something more than give pleasure: it should relate to our own life so as to increase our energy of spirit.
Kenneth Clark
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All great civilisations, in their early stages, are based on success in war.
Kenneth Clark
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We can destroy ourselves by cynicism and disillusion, just as effectively as by bombs.
Kenneth Clark
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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
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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
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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
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People sometimes tell me that they prefer barbarism to civilisation. I doubt if they have given it a long enough trial. Like the people of Alexandria, they are bored by civilisation but all the evidence suggests that the boredom of barbarism is infinitely greater.
Kenneth Clark