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The notion of style has long been the art historian's principal mode of classifying works of art. By style he selects and shapes the history of art.

— George Kubler

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History

More quotes by George Kubler

Purpose has no place in biology, but history has no meaning without it.

We always may be sure that every man-made thing arises from a problem as a purposeful solution.

The seventeenth-century academic separation between fine and useful arts first fell out of fashion nearly a century ago.

George Kubler (1961)

Although inanimate things remain our most tangible evidence that the old human past really existed, the conventional metaphors used to describe this visible past are mainly biological.

Unless he is an annalist or a chronicler, the historian communicates a pattern which was invisible to his subjects when they lived it, and unknown to his contemporaries before he detected it.

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A generation which ignores history has no past —and no future.

Robert A. Heinlein Time Enough for Love (1973)

History, Stephen said, is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.

James Joyce Ulysses (1922)

If we don’t care about our past we can’t have very much hope for our future.

Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis

I like the dreams of the future better than the history of the past, — so good night!

Thomas Jefferson

Attribution

Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: George Kubler (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.