Top 46 Rudolf Arnheim Quotes
#1. It is good to live in a country where all are immigrants ... the newcomer is simply the latest arrival.
Rudolf Arnheim
#2. As one gets older, it happens that in the morning one fails to remember the airplane trip to be taken in a few hours or the lecture scheduled for the afternoon.
Rudolf Arnheim
#3. A cloud can look like a camel, but a camel is unlikely to look like a cloud. This is so because the signifier must be able to stand for the whole category of the signified. The cloud looks like all camels, but no camel looks like all clouds.
Rudolf Arnheim
#4. All perceiving is also thinking, all reasoning is also intuition, all observation is also invention.
Rudolf Arnheim
#5. Entropy theory, on the other hand, is not concerned with the probability of succession in a series of items but with the overall distribution of kinds of items in a given arrangement.
Rudolf Arnheim
#6. In a land of immigrants, one was not an alien but simply the latest arrival.
Rudolf Arnheim
#7. A revolution must aim at the destruction of the given order and will succeed only by asserting an order of its own.
Rudolf Arnheim
#8. The clarification of visual forms and their organization in integrated patterns as well as the attribution of such forms to suitable objects is one of the most effective training grounds of the young mind.
Rudolf Arnheim
#9. At one of the annual conventions of the American Society for Aesthetics much confusion arose when the Society for Anesthetics met at the same time in the same hotel.
Rudolf Arnheim
#10. Every great artist gives birth to a new universe, in which the familiar things look the way they have never before looked to anyone.
Rudolf Arnheim
#11. A good documentary or educational film is not raw experience. The material has passed the mill of reason, it has been sifted and interpreted.
Rudolf Arnheim
#12. Man's striving for order, of which art is but one manifestation, derives from a similar universal tendency throughout the organic world; it is also paralleled by, and perhaps derived from, the striving towards the state of simplest structure in physical systems.
Rudolf Arnheim
#14. The ambition of instantaneous photography ... was that of preserving the spontaneity of action and avoiding any indication that the presence of the picture taker had a modifying influence on what was going on.
Rudolf Arnheim
#15. When a system is considered in two different states, the difference in volume or in any other property, between the two states, depends solely upon those states themselves and not upon the manner in which the system may pass from one state to the other.
Rudolf Arnheim
#16. The absurd consequences of neglecting structure but using the concept of order just the same are evident if one examines the present terminology of information theory.
Rudolf Arnheim
#17. Today we no longer regard the universe as the cause of our own undeserved troubles but perhaps, on the contrary, as the last refuge from the mismanagement of our earthly affairs.
Rudolf Arnheim
#18. The experienced physician, mechanic, or physiologist looking at a wound, an engine, a microscopic preparation, "sees" things the novice does not see. If both, experts and laymen, were asked to make exact copies of what they see, their drawings would be quite different.
Rudolf Arnheim
#19. Good art theory must smell of the studio, although its language should differ from the household talk of painters and sculptors.
Rudolf Arnheim
#20. Modem science, then, maintains on the one hand that nature, both organic and inorganic, strives towards a state of order and that man's actions are governed by the same tendency.
Rudolf Arnheim
#21. When the thing observed ... is seen as an agglomeration of pieces, the details lose their meaning and the whole becomes unrecognizable. This is often true of snapshots in which no pattern of salient shapes organizes the mass of vague and complex nuances.
Rudolf Arnheim
#22. Form is sometimes considered a mere spice added by the artist to the representation of objects in order to make it pleasurable.
Rudolf Arnheim
#23. Entropy theory is indeed a first attempt to deal with global form; but it has not been dealing with structure. All it says is that a large sum of elements may have properties not found in a smaller sample of them.
Rudolf Arnheim
#24. Order is a prerequisite of survival; therefore the impulse to produce orderly arrangements is inbred by evolution.
Rudolf Arnheim
#25. Order is a necessary condition for anything the human mind is to understand.
Rudolf Arnheim
#26. In many instances, order is apprehended first of all by the senses.
Rudolf Arnheim
#28. It would be most wholesome if for at least twenty years art historians were forbidden to refer to any derivations. If they were not allowed to account for a work of art mainly by tracing where it comes from, they would have to deal with it in and by itself
which is what they are most needed for.
Rudolf Arnheim
#29. The more perfect our means of direct experience, the more easily we are caught by the dangerous illusion that perceiving is tantamount to knowing and understanding.
Rudolf Arnheim
#30. Rather than be asked to abandon one's own heritage and to adapt to the mores of the new country, one was expected to possess a treasure of foreign skills and customs that would enrich the resources of American living.
Rudolf Arnheim
#31. No mature style of art in any culture has ever been simple. In certain cultures, an overall symmetry may conceal the complexity of the work at first glance.
Rudolf Arnheim
#32. A system is in equilibrium when the forces constituting it are arranged in such a way as to compensate each other, like the two weights pulling at the arms of a pair of scales.
Rudolf Arnheim
#33. The least touchable object in the world is the eye.
Rudolf Arnheim
#34. Furthermore, order is a necessary condition for making a structure function. A physical mechanism, be it a team of laborers, the body of an animal, or a machine, can work only if it is in physical order.
Rudolf Arnheim
#35. The fundamental peculiarity of the photographic medium; the physical objects themselves print their image by means of the optical and chemical action of light.
Rudolf Arnheim
#36. The line that describes the beautiful is elliptical. It has simplicity and constant change. It cannot be described by a compass, and it changes direction at every one of its points.
Rudolf Arnheim
#37. Variety is more than a means of avoiding boredom, since art is more than an entertainment of the senses.
Rudolf Arnheim
#38. Just as a chemist "isolates" a substance from contaminations that distort his view of its nature and effects, so the work of art purifies significant appearance. It presents abstract themes in their generality, but not reduced to diagrams.
Rudolf Arnheim
#39. Would there be any truth in saying that psychology was created by the sophists to sow distrust between man and his world?
Rudolf Arnheim
#40. The foreign accent was a promise, and indeed, all over the country, European imports added spice to the sciences, the arts, and other areas. What one had to give was not considered inferior to what one received.
Rudolf Arnheim
#41. The rehabilitation of order as a universal principle, however, suggested at the same time that orderliness by itself is not sufficient to account for the nature of organized systems in general or for those created by man in particular.
Rudolf Arnheim
#42. The principle of parsimony is valid esthetically in that the artist must not go beyond what is needed for his purpose.
Rudolf Arnheim
#43. The arts are neglected because they are based on perception, and perception is disdained because it is not assumed to involve thought.
Rudolf Arnheim
#44. The arts, as a reflection of human existence at its highest, have always and spontaneously lived up to this demand of plenitude. No mature style of art in any culture has ever been simple.
Rudolf Arnheim
#45. Some popular quotations smell of airless closets. They exhale the stale imagination of the intellectual lower middle class. "Suspension of disbelief" has become one of them. Dressed up as a scintillating double negation, it serves the pedestrian notion of art as illusion.
Rudolf Arnheim
#46. Once it is recognized that productive thinking in any area of cognition is perceptual thinking, the central function of art in general education will become evident.
Rudolf Arnheim
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