85 Quotes by Kenneth Clark

A lot of people you think you know you don’t know until you find out you don’t know then it may be too late to know.

I believe that in spite of the recent triumphs of science, men haven’t changed much in the last two thousand years; and in consequence we must still try to learn from history. History is ourselves.

No nude, however abstract, should fail to arouse in the spectator some vestige of erotic feeling, even if it be only the faintest shadow – and if it does not do so it is bad art and false morals.

A visual experience is vitalizing. Whereas to write great poetry, to draw continuously on one’s inner life, is not merely exhausting, it is to keep alight a consuming fire.

Evidently one cannot look for long at the Last Supper without ceasing to study it as a composition, and beginning to speak of it as a drama. It is the most literary of all great pictures, one of the few of which the effect may largely be conveyed – can even be enhanced – by description.

One musn’t overrate the culture of what used to be called “top people” before the wars. They had charming manners, but they were as ignorant as swans.

Pride, like humility, is destroyed by one’s insistence that he possesses it.

The moral and intellectual failure of Marxism has left us with no alternative to heroic materialism, and that isn’t enough.

I believe order is better than chaos, creation better than destruction. I prefer gentleness to violence, forgiveness to vendetta. On the whole I think that knowledge is preferable to ignorance, and I am sure that human sympathy is more valuable than ideology. I believe that in spite of the recent triumphs of science, men haven’t changed much in the last two thousand years; and in consequence we must try to learn from history.