Clive Bell Quotations

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

Detail is the heart of realism, and the fatty degeneration of art.

Cezanne is the Christopher Columbus of a new continent of form.

Comfort came in with the middle classes.

We have no other means of recognising a work of art than our feeling for it.

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.

Genius worship is the inevitable sign of an uncreative age.

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

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

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.