Quotes by Clive Bell

• Do not mistake a crowd of big wage-earners for the leisure class.
• It would follow that 'significant form' was form behind which we catch a sense of ultimate reality.
• It is the mark of great art that its appeal is universal and eternal.
• I will try to account for the degree of my aesthetic emotion. That, I conceive, is the function of the critic.
• The forms of art are inexhaustible; but all lead by the same road of aesthetic emotion to the same world of aesthetic ecstasy.
• 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.
• 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.
• We have no other means of recognising a work of art than our feeling for it.
• Genius worship is the inevitable sign of an uncreative age.
• Comfort came in with the middle classes.
• 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.
• All sensitive people agree that there is a peculiar emotion provoked by works of 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.
• 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.