Kenneth Clark Quotes
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A lot of people you think you know you don't know until you find out you don't know then it may be too late to know.
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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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Children who are treated as if they are uneducable almost invariably become uneducable.
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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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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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I wonder if a single thought that has helped forward the human spirit has ever been conceived or written down in an enormous room.
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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.
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Heroes do not easily tolerate the company of other heroes.
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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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All great civilizations, in their early stages, are based on success in war.
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As for the Messiah, it is, like Michelangelo's Creation of Adam, one of those rare works that appeal immediately to everyone, and yet is indisputably a masterpiece of the highest order.
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However much the various phases of the French Revolution may have modelled themselves on Roman history - the early phase on Republican virtue, the later on Imperial grandeur - the fact remains that classicism depended on a fixed and rational philosophy; whereas the spirit of the Revolution was one of change and of emotion.
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Almost all great painters in old age arrive at the same kind of broad, simplified style, as if they wanted to summarise the whole of their experience in a few strokes and blobs of colour.
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This became Delacroix's theme: that the achievements of the spirit - all that a great library contained - were the result of a state of society so delicately balanced that at the least touch they would be crushed beneath an avalanche of pent-up animal forces.
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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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We can destroy ourselves by cynicism and disillusion, just as effectively as by bombs.
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The great artist takes what he needs.
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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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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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His long struggle with physical passion was almost over, and, as with many other great sensualists, its place had been taken by an obsession with death.
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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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Sweeping, confident articles on the future seem to me, intellectually, the most disreputable of all forms of public utterance.
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Energy is eternal delight; and from the earliest times human beings have tried to imprison it in some durable hieroglyphic. It is perhaps the first of all the subjects of art.
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Leonardo is the Hamlet of art history whom each of us must recreate for himself.