Gombrich Quotes & Sayings

All the old bogeys of 'dignified subject-matter,' of 'balanced compositions,' of 'correct drawing' were laid to rest. The artist was responsible to no one but his own sensibilities for what he painted and how he painted it. — Ernst Gombrich

But Louis XIV had clever ministers, mainly men of humble origin chosen for their outstanding ability. — E.H. Gombrich

In those days they weren't citizens as we know them, but old landowning families with vast estates of fields and meadows. — E.H. Gombrich

The term which psychology has coined for our relative imperviousness to the dizzy variations that go on in the world around us is "constancy." The color, shape, and brightness of things remain to us relatively constant, even though we may notice some variation with the change of distance, illumination, angle of vision, and so on. — E.H. Gombrich

One never finishes learning about art. There are always new things to discover. — E.H. Gombrich

Art does not copy nature - it suggests it. — Ernst Gombrich

The Painter must leave the beholder something to guess. — Ernst Gombrich

Seeing depends on knowledge / And knowledge, of course, on your college / But when you are erudite and wise / What matters is to use your eyes. — Ernst Gombrich

It took some time before the public learned that to appreciate an Impressionist painting one has to step back a few yards, and enjoy the miracle of seeing these puzzling patches suddenly fall into one place and come to life before our eyes. — Ernst Gombrich

There really is no such thing as Art. There are only artists. — E.H. Gombrich

I know a wise Buddhist monk who, in a speech to his fellow countrymen, once said he'd love to know why someone who boasts that he is the cleverest, the strongest, the bravest or the most gifted man on earth is thought ridiculous and embarrassing, whereas if, instead of 'I', he says, 'we are the most intelligent, the strongest, the bravest and the most gifted people on earth', his fellow countrymen applaud enthusiastically and call him a patriot. For there is nothing patriotic about it. One can be attached to one's own country without needing to insist that the rest of the world's inhabitants are worthless. But as more and more people were taken in by this sort of nonsense, the menace to peace grew greater. — E.H. Gombrich

Hildebrand, too, challenged the ideals of scientific naturalism by an appeal to the psychology of perception: if we attempt to analyze our mental images to discover their primary constituents, we will find them composed of sense data derived from vision and from memories of touch and movement. A sphere, for instance, appears to the eye as a flat disk; it is touch which informs us of the properties of space and form. Any attempt on the part of the artist to eliminate this knowledge is futile, for without it he would not perceive the world at all. His task is, on the contrary, to compensate for the absence of movement in his work by clarifying his image and thus conveying not only visual sensations but also those memories of touch which enable us to reconstitute the three-dimensional form in our minds. — E.H. Gombrich

It's bad idea to try to prevent people from knowing their own history. If you want to do anything new you must first make sure you know what people have tried before. — E.H. Gombrich

The history of the world is, sadly, not a pretty poem. It offers little variety, and it is nearly always the unpleasant things that are repeated, over and over again. — E.H. Gombrich

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

Think of it like this. If you are sad because you can't have something you want - maybe a book or a toy - you can do one of two things: you can do your best to get it, or you can stop wanting it. Either way, if you succeed, you won't be sad any more. — E.H. Gombrich

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. — E.H. Gombrich

Cyrus became lord of that great realm. His first act was to free all the peoples held in captivity by the Babylonians. Among them were the Jews, who went home to Jerusalem — E.H. Gombrich

A member of a guild was bound to support his fellow members and not steal their trade, nor must he cheat his own customers with poor goods. He was expected to treat his apprentices and journeymen well and do his best to uphold the good name of his trade and his town. He was, so to speak, one of God's craftsmen, just as a knight was a warrior fighting for God. — E.H. Gombrich

Never favour those who flatter you most, but hold rather to those who risk your displeasure for your own good. Never neglect business for pleasure, organise your life so that there is time in it for relaxation and entertainment. Give the business of government your full attention. Inform yourself as much as you can before taking any decision. Make every effort to get to know men of distinction, so that you may call on them when you need them. Be courteous to all, speak hurtfully to no man. — E.H. Gombrich

But like the crusaders, who in the name of piety had carried out that dreadful massacre in Jerusalem, there were many citizens who failed to hear in those penitential sermons a call to mend their ways, and instead learnt to hate all those who didn't share their faith. — E.H. Gombrich

During the days of my youth, critics and art-lovers resorted freely to this term of abuse. Even some of the most renowned Old Masters were also pilloried as having manufactured insipid and sugary paintings that were offensive to good taste. — Ernst Gombrich

The artist creates his own elite, and the elite its own artists. — E.H. Gombrich

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. — E.H. Gombrich

What an artist worries about when he plans his pictures, is something ... difficult to put into words. Perhaps he would say he worries about whether he has got it 'right.' Now it is only when we understand what he means by this modest little word 'right' that we begin to understand what artists are really after. — Ernst Gombrich

One cannot explain the existence of genius. It is better to enjoy it. — Ernst Gombrich

Without this faculty of man and beast alike to recognize identities across the variations of difference, to make allowance for changed conditions, and to preserve the framework of a stable world, art could not exist. When we open our eyes under water we recognize objects, shapes, and colors although through an unfamiliar medium. When we first see pictures we see them in an unfamiliar medium. This is more than a mere pun. The two capacities are interrelated. Every time we meet with an unfamiliar type of transposition, there is a brief moment of shock and a period of adjustment-but it is an adjustment for which the mechanism exists in us. — E.H. Gombrich

All artistic discoveries are discoveries not of likenesses but of equivalencies which enable us to see reality in terms of an image and an image in terms of reality. — Ernst Gombrich

The photographic enthusiast likes to lure us into a darkened room in order to display his slides on a silver screen. Aided by the adaptability of the eye and by the borrowed light from the intense projector bulb, he can achieve those relationships in brightness that will make us dutifully admire the wonderful autumn tints he photographed on his latest trip. As soon as we look at a print of these photographs by day, the light seems to go out of them. It is one of the miracles of art that the same does not happen there. — Ernst Gombrich

The paintings in our galleries are seen one day in bright sunshine and another day in the dim light of a rainy afternoon, yet they remain the same paintings, ever faithful, ever convincing. To a marvelous extent they carry their own light within. For their truth is not that of a perfect replica, it is the truth of art. — Ernst Gombrich

But children grow up too, and they too must learn from history how easy it is for human beings to be transformed into inhuman beings through incitement and intolerance. — E.H. Gombrich

The first man to understand the extraordinary magical power of applying mathematical calculation to things in nature was an Italian called Galileo Galilei. — E.H. Gombrich

So much gold reached Europe from India and America that burghers grew richer and richer as knights and landowners grew poorer and poorer. — E.H. Gombrich

We shall never know what Rubens' children "really looked like," but this need not mean we are forever barred from examining the influence which acquired patterns or schema have on the organization of our perception. It would be interesting to examine this question in an experimental setting. but every student of art who has intensely occupied himself with a family of forms has experienced examples of such influence. In fact I vividly remember the shock I had while I was studying these formulas for chubby children: I never thought they could exist, but all of a sudden I saw such children everywhere. — E.H. Gombrich

We receive no message in the strict sense of the word when a friend enters a room and says "good morning." The word has no function to select from an ensemble of possible states, though situations are conceivable in which it would have.

The most interesting consequence of this way of looking at communication is the general conclusion that the greater the probability of a symbol's occurrence in any given situation, the smaller will be its information content. Where we can anticipate we need not listen. It is in this context that projection will do for perception. — E.H. Gombrich

We are all inclined to accept conventional forms or colours as the only correct ones. Children sometimes think that stars must be star-shaped, though naturally they are not. The people who insist that in a picture the sky must be blue, and the grass green, are not very different from these children. They get indignant if they see other colours in a picture, but if we try to forget all we have heard about green grass and blue skies, and look at the world as if we had just arrived from another planet on a voyage of discovery and were seeing it for the first time, we may find that things are apt to have the most surprising colours. — E.H. Gombrich

What I have always loved best about the history of the world is that it is true. That all the extraordinary things we read were no less real than you and I are today. — E.H. Gombrich

All art is image making and all image making is the creation of substitutes. — Ernst Gombrich

Palace with massive pillars and many courtyards, and his word was law. All the people of Egypt had to toil for him if he so decreed. And sometimes he did. — E.H. Gombrich

But because it lay between those two countries, first it would be conquered and ruled by the Egyptians, and then the Babylonians would invade, so that the people who lived there were constantly being driven from one place to another. They built themselves towns and fortresses, to no avail. They were still not strong — E.H. Gombrich

If you ask me what the world looks like to me, it looks like a painting by Pissarro. — Ernst Gombrich

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.H. Gombrich

Their assemblies had taught the Athenians how to discuss all matters openly, with arguments for and against. This was good training in learning how to think. — E.H. Gombrich

There is no reality without interpretation; just as there is no innocent eye, there is no innocent ear. — E.H. Gombrich

And it is because they seem so natural that they are so beautiful. — E.H. Gombrich

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. — E.H. Gombrich

if we want to avoid suffering, we must start with ourselves, because all suffering comes from our own desires. — E.H. Gombrich

At first there's nothing to see, but you feel a sort of weariness that tells you something is in the air. — E.H. Gombrich

China is, in fact, the only country in the world to be ruled for hundreds of years, not by the nobility, nor by soldiers, nor even by the priesthood, but by scholars. — E.H. Gombrich