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

Source: Civilisation (1969), Ch. 9: The Pursuit of Happiness

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "Opera, next to Gothic architecture, is one of the strangest inventions of western man. It could not have been foreseen …" by Kenneth Clark?
Kenneth Clark photo
Kenneth Clark 47
Art historian, broadcaster and museum director 1903–1983

Related quotes

Oscar Wilde photo

“If Nature had been comfortable, mankind would never have invented architecture”

The Decay of Lying (1889)
Context: If Nature had been comfortable, mankind would never have invented architecture... In a house, we all feel of the proper proportions. Everything is subordinated to us, fashioned for our use and our pleasure.

Marshall McLuhan photo

“Scribal culture and Gothic architecture were both concerned with light through, not light on.”

Marshall McLuhan (1911–1980) Canadian educator, philosopher, and scholar-- a professor of English literature, a literary critic, and a …

Source: 1960s, The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962), p. 120

Henry Adams photo
Francis Bacon photo

“Another argument of hope may be drawn from this — that some of the inventions already known are such as before they were discovered it could hardly have entered any man's head to think of; they would have been simply set aside as impossible.”

Aphorism 109
Novum Organum (1620), Book I
Context: Another argument of hope may be drawn from this — that some of the inventions already known are such as before they were discovered it could hardly have entered any man's head to think of; they would have been simply set aside as impossible. For in conjecturing what may be men set before them the example of what has been, and divine of the new with an imagination preoccupied and colored by the old; which way of forming opinions is very fallacious, for streams that are drawn from the springheads of nature do not always run in the old channels.

Thomas Henry Huxley photo
Bertrand Russell photo

“The rules of logic are to mathematics what those of structure are to architecture.”

Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) logician, one of the first analytic philosophers and political activist

1900s, "The Study of Mathematics" (November 1907)

John Nash photo
Noel Fielding photo

Related topics