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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

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Kenneth Clark
Life
Merely
Consuming
Poetry
Visuals
Fire
Visual
Experience
Whereas
Write
Burning
Vitalizing
Keep
Draw
Alight
Great
Draws
Continuously
Writing
Inner
Exhausting

More quotes by 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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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.
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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.
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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.
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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
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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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We can destroy ourselves by cynicism and disillusion, just as effectively as by bombs.
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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Heroes do not easily tolerate the company of other heroes.
Kenneth Clark
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Children who are treated as if they are uneducable almost invariably become uneducable.
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A racist system inevitably destroys and damages human beings it brutalizes and dehumanizes them, blacks and whites alike.
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In time of war all countries behave equally badly, because the power of action is handed over to stupid and obstinate men.
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Conventional nudes based on classical originals could bear no burden of thought or inner life without losing their formal completeness.
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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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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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All color is no color.
Kenneth Clark
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The history of art cannot be properly understood without some reference to the history of science. In both we are studying the symbols by which man affirms his mental scheme, and these symbols, be they pictorial or mathematical, a fable or formula, will reflect the same changes.
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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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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Just as a classical dancer repeats the same movements again and again, in order to achieve a greater perfection of line and balance, so Degas repeats the same motifs - it was one of the things that gave him so much sympathy with dancers.
Kenneth Clark