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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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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.
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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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I believe in the God-given genius of certain individuals, and I value a society that makes their existence possible.
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All great civilisations, in their early stages, are based on success in war.
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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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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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Children who are treated as if they are uneducable almost invariably become uneducable.
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We can destroy ourselves by cynicism and disillusion, just as effectively as by bombs.
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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.
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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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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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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.
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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.
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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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All color is no color.
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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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The dark ghettos are social, political, educational and-above all-economic colonies. Their inhabitants are subject peoples, victims of the greed, cruelty, insensitivity, guilt, and fear of their masters.
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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.
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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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A racist system inevitably destroys and damages human beings it brutalizes and dehumanizes them, blacks and whites alike.
Kenneth Clark