Skip to content

However useful it is for pedagogical purposes, the biological metaphor of style as a sequence of life-stages was historically misleading, for it bestowed upon the flux of events the shapes and behavior of organisms.

— George Kubler

Another quote →

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 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.

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.

All George Kubler quotes →

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.