25 quotes
Leonardo is the Hamlet of art history whom each of us must recreate for himself.
Leonardo da Vinci (1939)
In time of war all countries behave equally badly, because the power of action is handed over to stupid and obstinate men.
The Other Half: A Self Portrait (1977)
It is lack of confidence, more than anything else, that kills a civilisation. We can destroy ourselves by cynicism and disillusion, just as effectively as by bombs.
Civilisation (1969)
Heroes do not easily tolerate the company of other heroes.
Civilisation (1969)
Opera, next to Gothic architecture, is one of the strangest inventions of western man. It could not have been foreseen by any logical process.
Civilisation (1969)
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.
Civilisation (1969)
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.
The Nude: A Study in Ideal Form (1951)
I wonder if a single thought that has helped forward the human spirit has ever been conceived or written down in an enormous room.
Civilisation (1969)
Conventional nudes based on classical originals could bear no burden of thought or inner life without losing their formal completeness.
The Nude: A Study in Ideal Form (1951)
As for the Messiah, it is, like Michelangelo's Creation of Adam, one of those rare works that appeal immediately to everyone, and yet is indisputably a masterpiece of the highest order.
Civilisation (1969)
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.
Leonardo da Vinci (1939)
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.
The Nude: A Study in Ideal Form (1951)
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.
The Romantic Rebellion (1973)
His long struggle with physical passion was almost over, and, as with many other great sensualists, its place had been taken by an obsession with death.
The Nude: A Study in Ideal Form (1951)
The great artist takes what he needs.
Civilisation (1969)
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.
The Nude: A Study in Ideal Form (1951)
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.
The Romantic Rebellion (1973)
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.
Civilisation (1969)
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.
The Nude: A Study in Ideal Form (1951)
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.
Ruskin Today (1964)