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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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Kenneth Clark
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More quotes by Kenneth Clark

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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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A racist system inevitably destroys and damages human beings it brutalizes and dehumanizes them, blacks and whites alike.
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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.
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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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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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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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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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In time of war all countries behave equally badly, because the power of action is handed over to stupid and obstinate men.
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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We can destroy ourselves by cynicism and disillusion, just as effectively as by bombs.
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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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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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
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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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Heroes do not easily tolerate the company of other heroes.
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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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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All great civilisations, in their early stages, are based on success in war.
Kenneth Clark