Quotes from Kenneth Clark

We can destroy ourselves by cynicism and disillusion just as affectively as by bombs.

The Cathedrals were built to the glory of God; New York was built to the glory of Mammon.

Lives devoted to Beauty seldom end well.

It would be unfair to say that I prefer the back of a book to its contents, but it is true that the sight of a lot of books gives me the hope that I may some day read them, which sometimes develops into the belief that I have read them.

As I have said, it may be difficult to define civilization, but it isn't so difficult to recognize barbarism.

The moral and intellectual failure of Marxism has left us with no alternative to heroic materialism, and that isn't enough.

Everybody who writes about Blake begins by saying that he was a visionary. It is a vague term. All artists, even the most realistic, start with some kind of vision - that is what leads them to select what they need from the infinite diversity of appearances.

How did he do it? First of all, with the help of an outstanding teacher and librarian named Alcuin of York, he collected books and had them copied. People don't always realise that only three or four antique manuscripts of the Latin authors are still in existence: our whole knowledge of ancient literature is due to the collecting and copying that began under Charlemagne, and almost any classical text that survived until the eighth century has survived till today.

At some time in the ninth century one could have looked down the Seine and seen the prow of a Viking ship coming up the river. Looked at today in the British Museum it is a powerful work of art; but to the mother of a family trying to settle down in her little hut, it would have seemed less agreeable – as menacing to her civilisation as the periscope of a nuclear submarine.

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.

Opera, next to Gothic architecture, is one of the strangest inventions of Western man. It could not have been foreseen by any logical process.

I believe in the God-given genius of certain individuals, and I value a society that makes their existence possible.

Art...must do something more than give pleasure: it should relate to our own life so as to increase our energy of spirit.

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.

To hurry through the rise and fall of a fine, full sentence is like defying the role of time in human life.

Conventional nudes based on classical originals could bear no burden of thought or inner life without losing their formal completeness.

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.

Children who are treated as if they are uneducable almost invariably become uneducable.

We can destroy ourselves by cynicism and disillusion, just as effectively as by bombs.

Opera, next to Gothic architecture, is one of the strangest inventions of Western man. It could not have been foreseen by any logical process.

Ask any decent person what he thinks matters most in human conduct: five to one his answer will be "kindness."

We can destroy ourselves by cynicism and disillusion just as effectively as by bombs.

In time of war all countries behave equally badly, because the power of action is handed over to stupid and obstinate men.

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.