Quote

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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Kenneth Clark
Reading
Forward
Spirit
Except
Thought
Room
Conceived
Ever
Perhaps
Museum
Human
Rooms
Museums
Humans
Single
Helped
Wonder
Enormous
Written
British

More quotes by Kenneth Clark

Image
We can destroy ourselves by cynicism and disillusion, just as effectively as by bombs.
Kenneth Clark
Image
The great achievement of the Catholic Church lay in harmonizing, civilizing the deepest impulses of ordinary, ignorant people.
Kenneth Clark
Image
In time of war all countries behave equally badly, because the power of action is handed over to stupid and obstinate men.
Kenneth Clark
Image
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
Image
I believe in the God-given genius of certain individuals, and I value a society that makes their existence possible.
Kenneth Clark
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
Conventional nudes based on classical originals could bear no burden of thought or inner life without losing their formal completeness.
Kenneth Clark
Image
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
Image
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
Image
To hurry through the rise and fall of a fine, full sentence is like defying the role of time in human life.
Kenneth Clark
Image
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
Image
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.
Kenneth Clark
Image
All great civilisations, in their early stages, are based on success in war.
Kenneth Clark
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
A racist system inevitably destroys and damages human beings it brutalizes and dehumanizes them, blacks and whites alike.
Kenneth Clark