Clive Bell Quotes

#1. Leslie Stephen died in 1904. In that year his children retreated to Wales for a period and then travelled in Italy. Vanessa and Virginia went on to Paris, where they met up with Clive Bell. On returning to London, Virginia suffered
a severe, suicidal breakdown.

Jane Goldman

#2. Why do people venerate Einstein or Bill Gates? Clive Bell explains: Genius worship is the inevitable sign of an uncreative age ...

John Geddes

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

Clive Bell

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

Clive Bell

#5. Civilized people can talk about anything. For them no subject is taboo ... In civilized societies there will be no intellectual bogeys at sight of which great grownup babies are expected to hide their eyes.

Clive Bell

#6. 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

#7. Be a force of love as often as you can and turn away negative thoughts whenever you feel them surface.

Wayne Dyer

#8. Comfort came in with the middle classes.

Clive Bell

#9. The critic can affect my aesthetic theories only by affecting my aesthetic experience. All systems of aesthetics must be based on personal experience--that is to say, they must be subjective.

Clive Bell

#10. You know you're not anonymous on our site. We're greeting you by name, showing you past purchases, to the degree that you can arrange to have transparency combined with an explanation of what the consumer benefit is.

Jeff Bezos

#11. If we can make the correct diagnosis, the healing can begin. If we can't, both our personal health and our economy are doomed.

Andrew Weil

#12. Actors are journeymen. We show up for work. We do the job and then we go. What goes on behind the scenes is what goes on behind the scenes.

Joe Mantegna

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

Clive Bell

#14. Part of growing up was learning not to be quite that honest - learning when it was better to lie, rather than to hurt someone with the truth.

Jodi Picoult

#15. Winning is great, sure, but if you are really going to do something in life, the secret is learning how to lose. Nobody goes undefeated all the time. If you can pick up after a crushing defeat, and go on to win again, you are going to be a champion someday.

Wilma Rudolph

#16. Our lives are before us, not behind."
"That depends on where you're standing on the timeline.

Heidi Heilig

#17. 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

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

Clive Bell

#19. 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

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

Clive Bell

#21. Art and relligion are not professions: they are not occupations for which men can be paid. The artist and the saint do what they have to do, not to make a living, but in obedience to some mysterious necessity. They do not product to live - they live to produce.

Clive Bell

#22. 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

#23. Well, when I was a young writer the people we read were Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Sartre, Camus, Celine, Malraux. And to begin with, I was a bit of a copycat writer and very derivative and tried to write a novel using their voices, really ... I keep it out of print.

Mordecai Richler

#24. The starting-point for all systems of aesthetics must be the personal experience of a peculiar emotion. The objects that provoke this emotion we call works of art.

Clive Bell

#25. It is not by his mixing and choosing, but by the shapes of his colors, and the combination of those shapes, that we recognize the colorist. Color becomes significant only when it becomes form.

Clive Bell

#26. Kids today don't want to get married. Too many of their friends have been married and divorced already. They just don't believe in it.

Wally Schirra

#27. All the evidence you need to prove God is waiting within you to be discovered.

Erwin McManus

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

Clive Bell

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

Clive Bell

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

Clive Bell

#31. 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

#32. The representative element in a work of art may or may not be harmful, but it is always irrelevant. For to appreciate a work of art, we must bring with us nothing from life, no knowledge of its affairs and ideas, no familiarity with its emotions.

Clive Bell

#33. A pale ring of sunlight burns into the clouds like the end of a lit cigarette.

Veronica Roth

#34. 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

#35. Someone who wants to succeed has to overcome his own greed first

Lu Buwei

#36. Let the artist have just enough to eat, and the tools of this trade: ask nothing of him. 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

#37. Every time you see someone's bright-and-shiny, remember: They have their own crappy truths too. Of course they do. And every time you see your own crappy truth and feel despair and think, 'Is this my life?', remember: It's not. Everyone's got a bright-and-shiny, even if it's hard to find sometimes.

Sophie Kinsella

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

Clive Bell

#39. So intent was Frank upon solving the puzzle of Lemarchand's box that he didn't hear the great bell begin to ring.

Clive Barker