Clive Bell Quotes

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

  Clive Bell

  Topics in Art

• Only reason can convinceus 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

  Topics in Uncategorized

• Materially make the life of the artist sufficiently miserable to be unattractive, and no one will take to art save those in whom the divine daemon is absolute.

  Clive Bell

  Topics in Uncategorized

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

  Clive Bell

  Topics in Uncategorized

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

  Clive Bell

  Topics in Emotion

  Tags in People, Sensitive

• 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

  Topics in Work

  Tags in Visible, Result, Human

• 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

  Topics in Family

  Tags in Religions, Similar

• Comfort came in with the middle classes.

  Clive Bell

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Comfort, Middle

• Genius worship is the inevitable sign of an uncreative age.

  Clive Bell

  Topics in Genius

  Tags in Inevitable, Worship

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

  Clive Bell

  Topics in Mistake

  Tags in Class

• I will try to account for the degree of my aesthetic emotion. That, I conceive, is the function of the critic.

  Clive Bell

  Topics in Emotion

  Tags in Function, Conceive

• 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

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Fundamental, Effective, Questions

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

  Clive Bell

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Appeal, Great

• 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

  Topics in Emotion

  Tags in Must, Inexhaustible

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

  Clive Bell

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Reality, Sense, Follow

• 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

  Topics in Work

  Tags in Quality, Without

• 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

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in People, Beautiful, Intelligent

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

  Clive Bell

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Means, Feeling

Clive Bell (18)

Birth:	16th September, 1881
Death:	18th September, 1964
Nationality:	British
Profession:	Critic

About

Arthur Clive Heward Bell was born in East Shefford, Berkshire. He was an English art critic, associated with formalism and the Bloomsbury Group. He was educated at Marlborough and Trinity College, Cambridge, where he studied history.

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