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
Ruthless, greedy, tyrannical, disreputable they have had one principle worth all the rest, the principle of delight!
– Kenneth Clark
The great achievement of the Catholic Church lay in harmonizing, civilizing the deepest impulses of ordinary, ignorant people.
– Kenneth Clark
To hurry through the rise and fall of a fine, full sentence is like defying the role of time in human life.
– Kenneth Clark
We can destroy ourselves by cynicism and disillusion, just as effectively as by bombs.
– Kenneth Clark
Opera, next to Gothic architecture, is one of the strangest inventions of Western man. It could not have been foreseen by any logical process.