Quotes from E.H. Gombrich

And if we also ask, 'And how exactly did that happen?' we will be asking about history. Not just a story, but our story, the story that we call the history of the world. Shall we begin?

The more we become aware of the enormous pull in man to repeat what he has learned, the greater will be our admiration for those exceptional beings who could break this spell and make a significant advance on which others could build.

Porque es una máxima constante que nadie ve lo que son las cosas si no sabe lo que deberían ser.

The artist gives the beholder increasingly 'more to do,' he draws him into the magic circle of creation and allows him to experience something of the thrill of 'making' which had once been the privilege of the artist

For my understanding depends not only on my expectation and experience of possible types of music, but also on my knowledge of possible types of painting-in other words, on the mental set with which I approach the Mondrian.

If Mr. Hauser finds that he is concerned with entities in history which constantly elude his grasp, if he finds that the bourgeoisie and the aristocracy, rationalism and subjectivism constantly seem to change places in his field of vision, he should ask himself whether he is looking through a telescope or a kaleidoscope.

That power of holding on to an image that Ruskin describes so admirably is not the power of the eidetic; it is that faculty of keeping a large number of relationships present in one's mind that distinguishes all mental achievement, be it that of the chess player, the composer, or the great artist.

I have tried to tell the Story of Art as the story of a continuous weaving and challenging of traditions in which each work refers to the past and points to the future. For there is no aspect of this story more wonderful than this-- that a living chain of tradition still links the art of our own days with that of the Pyramid age.

One Egyptian word for sculptor was actually 'He-who-keeps-alive.

The possibility that all recognition of images is connected with projections and visual anticipations is strengthened by the results of recent experiments. It appears that if you show an observer the image of a pointing hand or arrow, he will tend to shift its location somehow in the direction of the movement. Without this tendency of ours to see potential movement in the form of anticipation, artists would never have been able to create the suggestion of speed in stationary images.

He spread his paint on canvas-here light, there dark-till it looked like a streaked agate stone, and then "with little trouble," he made a finished painting emerge surprisingly out of the chaos of mixed paint.

A white handkerchief in the shade may be objectively darker than a lump of coal in the sunshine. We rarely confuse the one with the other because the coal will on the whole be the blackest patch in our field of vision, the handkerchief the whitest, and it is relative brightness that matters and that we are aware of.

We all know the experience at the moving pictures when we are ushered to a seat very far off-center. At first the screen and what is on it look so distorted and unreal we feel like leaving. But in a few minutes we have learned to take our position into account, and the proportions right themselves. And as with shapes, so with colors.

E]very community insists on what Professor G. J. Renier calls "the Story that must be told" about its own past, and where scholarship decays, myth will crowd in.

The Greeks said that to marvel is the beginning of knowledge and where we cease to marvel we may be in danger of ceasing to know.

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