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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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More quotes by 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.
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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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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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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.
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The great achievement of the Catholic Church lay in harmonizing, civilizing the deepest impulses of ordinary, ignorant people.
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All color is no color.
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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.
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Children who are treated as if they are uneducable almost invariably become uneducable.
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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.
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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.
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Racial prejudices are indication of a disturbed and potentially unstable society.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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
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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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Heroes do not easily tolerate the company of other heroes.
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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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
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You have no idea what portrait painters suffer from the vanity of their sitters.
Kenneth Clark