Clive Bell Quotes


"It would follow that 'significant form' was form behind which we catch a sense of ultimate reality."
- Clive Bell
(Related: Reality, Sense)

"It is the mark of great art that its appeal is universal and eternal."
- Clive Bell
(Related: Art)

"I will try to account for the degree of my aesthetic emotion. That, I conceive, is the function of the critic."
- Clive Bell
(Related: Emotion, Will)

"The forms of art are inexhaustible; but all lead by the same road of aesthetic emotion to the same world of aesthetic ecstasy."
- Clive Bell
(Related: Art, Ecstasy, Emotion, Road, World)

"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."
- Clive Bell
(Related: Art, Work, Quality)

"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."
- Clive Bell
(Related: Art, Work, People, Now, Roses)

"We have no other means of recognising a work of art than our feeling for it."
- Clive Bell
(Related: Art, Work, Feeling)

"Genius worship is the inevitable sign of an uncreative age."
- Clive Bell
(Related: Age, Genius, Worship)

"Comfort came in with the middle classes."
- Clive Bell
(Related: Comfort)

"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."
- Clive Bell
(Related: Art, Family, Men, Religion, Alliance, Circumstance, Ecstasy, Mind, Religious, states)

"All sensitive people agree that there is a peculiar emotion provoked by works of art."
- Clive Bell
(Related: Art, People, Emotion)

"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."
- Clive Bell
(Related: Art, Work, Earth, Mind, Result)

"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."
- Clive Bell
(Related: Open, Questions, Reason)