Quotes from Clive Bell

All sensitive people agree that there is a peculiar emotion provoked by works of art.

It is the mark of great art that its appeal is universal and eternal.

Comfort came in with the middle classes.

Art and religion are, then, two roads by which men escape from circumstance to ecstacy.

We all agree now - by 'we' I mean intelligent people under sixty - that a work of art is like a rose. A rose is not beautiful because it is like something else. Neither is a work of art. Roses and works of art are beautiful in themselves.

I have been using art as a means to the emotions of life and reading into it the ideas of life.

Genius worship is the inevitable sign of an uncreative age.

Only reason can convince us of those three fundamental truths without a recognition of which there can be no effective liberty: that what we believe is not necessarily true; that what we like is not necessarily good; and that all questions are open.

It would follow that 'significant form' was form behind which we catch a sense of ultimate reality.

Art and Religion are, then, two roads by which men escape from circumstance to ecstasy. Between aesthetic and religious rapture there is a family alliance. Art and Religion are means to similar states of mind.

Do not mistake a crowd of big wage earners for the leisure class.

There must be some one quality without which a work of art cannot exist; possessing which, in the least degree, no work is altogether worthless.

The forms of art are inexhaustible; but all lead by the same road of aesthetic emotion to the same world of aesthetic ecstasy.

Art and Religion are, then, two roads by which men escape from circumstance to ecstasy. Between aesthetic and religious rapture there is a family alliance. Art and Religion are means to similar states of mind.

Genius worship is the inevitable sign of an uncreative age.

A rose is the visible result of an infinitude of complicated goings on in the bosom of the earth and in the air above, and similarly a work of art is the product of strange activities in the human mind.

I have been using art as a means to the emotions of life and reading into it the ideas of life.

The critic can affect my aesthetic theories only by affecting my aesthetic experience. All systems of aesthetics must be based on personal experience--that is to say, they must be subjective.

you cannot imagine a boundary line without any content, or a content without a boundary line.

The representative element in a work of art may or may not be harmful; always it is irrelevant. For, to appreciate a work of art we need bring with us nothing from life, no knowledge of its ideas and affairs, no familiarity with its emotions. Art

We have no other means of recognising a work of art than our feeling for it. The objects that provoke aesthetic emotion vary with each individual.

Significant Form" is the one quality common to all works of visual art.

A rose is the visible result of an infinitude of complicated goings on in the bosom of the earth and in the air above, and similarly a work of art is the product of strange activities in the human mind.