Top 50 Kenneth Clark Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “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.”

— Kenneth Clark

2. “Children who are treated as if they are uneducable almost invariably become uneducable.”

— Kenneth Clark

3. “Opera, next to Gothic architecture, is one of the strangest inventions of Western man. It could not have been foreseen by any logical process.”

— Kenneth Clark

4. “In time of war all countries behave equally badly, because the power of action is handed over to stupid and obstinate men.”

— Kenneth Clark

5. “It is often said that Leonardo drew so well because he knew about things; it is truer to say that he knew about things because he drew so well.”

— Kenneth Clark

6. “I believe in courtesy, the ritual by which we avoid hurting other people’s feelings by satisfying our own egos.”

— Kenneth Clark

7. “The eye instinctively looks for analogies and amplifies them, so that a face imagined in the pattern of a wallpaper may become more vivid than a photograph.”

— Kenneth Clark

8. “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.”

— Kenneth Clark

9. “I wonder if a single thought that has helped forward the human spirit has ever been conceived or written down in an enormous room: except, perhaps, in the reading room of the British Museum.”

— Kenneth Clark

10. “The nude does not simply represent the body, but relates it, by analogy, to all structures that have become part of our imaginative experience.”

— Kenneth Clark

11. “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.”

— Kenneth Clark

12. “Few people can look at a painting longer than it takes to peel an orange and eat it.”

— Kenneth Clark

13. “A racist system inevitably destroys and damages human beings; it brutalizes and dehumanizes them, blacks and whites alike.”

— Kenneth Clark

14. “I believe in the God-given genius of certain individuals, and I value a society that makes their existence possible.”

— Kenneth Clark

15. “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.”

— Kenneth Clark

16. “People sometimes tell me that they prefer barbarism to civilisation. I doubt if they have given it a long enough trial. Like the people of Alexandria, they are bored by civilisation; but all the evidence suggests that the boredom of barbarism is infinitely greater.”

— Kenneth Clark

17. “We are part of a great whole. All living things are our brothers and sisters.”

— Kenneth Clark

18. “Leonardo is the Hamlet of art history whom each of us must recreate for himself.”

— Kenneth Clark

19. “The dark ghettos are social, political, educational and-above all-economic colonies. Their inhabitants are subject peoples, victims of the greed, cruelty, insensitivity, guilt, and fear of their masters.”

— Kenneth Clark

20. “As I have said, it may be difficult to define civilization, but it isn’t so difficult to recognize barbarism.”

— Kenneth Clark

21. “Lives devoted to Beauty seldom end well.”

— Kenneth Clark

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

— Kenneth Clark

23. “Conventional nudes based on classical originals could bear no burden of thought or inner life without losing their formal completeness.”

— Kenneth Clark

24. “Heroes do not easily tolerate the company of other heroes.”

— Kenneth Clark

25. “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.”

— Kenneth Clark

26. “We can hardly imagine a state of mind in which all material objects were regarded as symbols of spirtual truths or episodes in sacred history. Yet, unless we make this effort of imagination, Medieval art is largely incomprehensible.”

— Kenneth Clark

27. “The Cathedrals were built to the glory of God; New York was built to the glory of Mammon.”

— Kenneth Clark

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

— Kenneth Clark

29. “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.”

— Kenneth Clark

30. “Changes in the structure of society are not brought about solely by massive engines of doctrine. The first flash of insight which persuades human beings to change their basic assumptions is usually contained in a few phrases.”

— Kenneth Clark

31. “You have no idea what portrait painters suffer from the vanity of their sitters.”

— Kenneth Clark

32. “Fine colour implies a unified relationship, in which each part is subordinate to the whole, and the transitions between them are felt to be as precious and beautiful as the colours themselves. In fact, the colours themselves must be continuously modified and broken as part of the transition.”

— Kenneth Clark

33. “Only the bad artists of the nineteenth century were frightened by the invention of photography; the good ones all welcomed it and used it.”

— Kenneth Clark

34. “To hurry through the rise and fall of a fine, full sentence is like defying the role of time in human life.”

— Kenneth Clark

35. “All color is no color.”

— Kenneth Clark

36. “The various parts of the body cannot be perceived as simple units and have no clear relationship to one another. In almost every detail the body is not the shape that art has led us to believe it should be.”

— Kenneth Clark

37. “Almost all great painters in old age arrive at the same kind of broad, simplified style, as if they wanted to summarise the whole of their experience in a few strokes and blobs of colour.”

— Kenneth Clark

38. “This became Delacroix ’s theme: that the achievements of the spirit all that a great library contained were the result of a state of society so delicately balanced that at the least touch they would be crushed beneath an avalanche of pent-up animal forces.”

— Kenneth Clark

39. “Just as a classical dancer repeats the same movements again and again, in order to achieve a greater perfection of line and balance, so Degas repeats the same motifs – it was one of the things that gave him so much sympathy with dancers.”

— Kenneth Clark

40. “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.”

— Kenneth Clark

41. “All great civilisations, in their early stages, are based on success in war.”

— Kenneth Clark

42. “Those who wish, in the interest of morality, to reduce Leonardo, that inexhaustible source of creative power, to a neutral or sexless agency, have a strange idea of doing service to his reputation.”

— Kenneth Clark

43. “Racial prejudices are indication of a disturbed and potentially unstable society.”

— Kenneth Clark

44. “Devotion to the facts will always give the pleasures of recognition; adherence to the rules of design, the pleasures of order and certainty.”

— Kenneth Clark

45. “Sweeping, confident articles on the future seem to me, intellectually, the most disreputable of all forms of public utterance.”

— Kenneth Clark

46. “I just don’t think the moon is going to be an adequate substitute for the fact that we haven’t addressed ourselves to clearing up the slums.”

— Kenneth Clark

47. “The illustrator is essentially a reporter: his subjects come from the outside, lit by a flash. A subject comes to the classical artist from inside, and when he discovers confirmation of it in the outside world he feels that it has been there all the time.”

— Kenneth Clark

48. “Energy is eternal delight; and from the earliest times human beings have tried to imprison it in some durable hieroglyphic. It is perhaps the first of all the subjects of art.”

— Kenneth Clark

49. “It would be unfair to say that I prefer the back of a book to its contents, but it is true that the sight of a lot of books gives me the hope that I may some day read them, which sometimes develops into the belief that I have read them.”

— Kenneth Clark

50. “Over and above the political, economic, sociological, and international implications of racial prejudices, their major significance is that they place unnecessary burdens upon human beings.”

— Kenneth Clark