George Kubler

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

"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."

"Actuality is when the lighthouse is dark between flashes: it is the instant between the ticks of the watch: it is a void interval slipping forever through time: the rupture between past and future: th…"

"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 cultural clock runs mainly upon ruined fragments of matter. No matter to what hazardous lengths we let out our line they still withdraw again, and further, into the depths. ... however, runs mainl…"

"Instead of an idea of style, which embraces too many associations, have outlined the idea of a linked succession of prime works with replications, all being distributed in time as recognizably early a…"

"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."

"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 behavio…"