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 wi…

- Clive Bell

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 bec…

- Clive Bell

Art and Religion are, then, two roads by which men escape from circumstance to ecstasy. Between aesthetic and religious rapture there is a family all…

- Clive Bell

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

- Clive Bell

Civilized people can talk about anything. For them no subject is taboo.... In civilized societies there will be no intellectual bogeys at sight of wh…

- Clive Bell

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

- Clive Bell

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…

- Clive Bell

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

- Clive Bell

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 …

- Clive Bell