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

All sensitive people agree that there is a peculiar emotion provoked by works of art.
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 alliance. Art and Religion are means to similar states of mind.
Clive Bell

Comfort came in with the middle classes.
Clive Bell

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

Genius worship is the inevitable sign of an uncreative age.
Clive Bell

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

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

It would follow that 'significant form' was form behind which we catch a sense of ultimate reality.
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 is not necessarily true; that what we like is not necessarily good; and that all questions are open.
Clive Bell


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

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

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

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