Quote

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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Kenneth Clark
Manners
Wars
Ignorant
Called
War
Culture
Overrate
Used
Swans
People
Charming

More quotes by Kenneth Clark

Image
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
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
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
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
We can destroy ourselves by cynicism and disillusion, just as effectively as by bombs.
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
You have no idea what portrait painters suffer from the vanity of their sitters.
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
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
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
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
Image
A racist system inevitably destroys and damages human beings it brutalizes and dehumanizes them, blacks and whites alike.
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
All great civilisations, in their early stages, are based on success in war.
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
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
Image
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
Image
Racial prejudices are indication of a disturbed and potentially unstable society.
Kenneth Clark
Image
The great achievement of the Catholic Church lay in harmonizing, civilizing the deepest impulses of ordinary, ignorant people.
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