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There really is no such thing as Art. There are only artists.

— Ernst Gombrich

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Art

More quotes by Ernst Gombrich

If you want to do anything new you must first make sure you know what people have tried before.

A Little History of the World (2005)

Even though I came from a Jewish home myself, it never entered my head that such horrors might be repeated in my own lifetime.

A Little History of the World (2005)

Anyone who can handle a needle convincingly can make us see a thread which is not there.

Art and Illusion (1960)

Images apparently occupy a curious position somewhere between the statements of language, which are intended to convey a meaning, and the things of nature, to which we only can give a meaning.

Symbolic Images (1972)

Like art, science is born of itself, not of nature. There is no neutral naturalism. The artist, no less than the writer, needs a vocabulary before he can embark on a 'copy' of reality.

E. H. Gombrich (1962)

All Ernst Gombrich quotes →

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All religions, arts and sciences are branches of the same tree. All these aspirations are directed toward ennobling man's life, lifting it from the sphere of mere physical existence and leading the individual towards freedom.

Albert Einstein Moral Decay (1937)

The great artists are the ones who dare to entitle to beauty things so natural that when they're seen afterward, people say: Why did I never realize before that this too was beautiful?

André Gide The Immoralist (1902)

A genuine work of art must mean many things; the truer its art, the more things it will mean.

George MacDonald The Fantastic Imagination (1893)

Were art to redeem man, it could do so only by saving him from the seriousness of life and restoring him to an unexpected boyishness.

José Ortega y Gasset The Dehumanization of Art and Ideas about the Novel (1925)

Attribution

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