Rudolf Arnheim Quotes

33 Sourced Quotes

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
All perceiving is also thinking, all reasoning is also intuition, all observation is also invention.

Rudolf Arnheim
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
It is good to live in a country where all are immigrants... the newcomer is simply the latest arrival.

Rudolf Arnheim
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
What, then, is the basic difference between today's computer and an intelligent being? It is that the computer can be made to seebut not to perceive. What matters here is not that the computer is without consciousness but that thus far it is incapable of the spontaneous grasp of pattern--a capacity essential to perception and intelligence.

Rudolf Arnheim
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
Variety is more than a means of avoiding boredom, since art is more than an entertainment of the senses.

Rudolf Arnheim
The principle of parsimony is valid esthetically in that the artist must not go beyond what is needed for his purpose.

Rudolf Arnheim
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
Form is sometimes considered a mere spice added by the artist to the representation of objects in order to make it pleasurable.

Rudolf Arnheim
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
Since mechanically obtained randomness contains all kinds of possible permutations, including the most regular ones, it cannot be relied upon always to exhibit a pervasive irregularity.

Rudolf Arnheim
An orgy of self-expression is no more productive than blind obedience to rules.

Rudolf Arnheim
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
The arts are neglected because they are based on perception, and perception is disdained because it is not assumed to involve thought.

Rudolf Arnheim
In many instances, order is apprehended first of all by the senses.

Rudolf Arnheim
We supply children with pocket calculators, but we must consider that the saving in time and effort is made at the expense of precious and elementary training of the brain. Genuine productive thinking starts at the simplest level, and the basic operations of arithmetic offer fine opportunities.

Rudolf Arnheim
Would there be any truth in saying that psychology was created by the sophists to sow distrust between man and his world?

Rudolf Arnheim
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
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
But art not only exploits the variety of appearances, it also affirms the validity of individual outlook and thereby admits a further dimension of variety. Since the shapes of art do not primarily bear witness to the objective nature of the things for which they stand, they can reflect individual interpretation and invention.

Rudolf Arnheim
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
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
Nothing is more humbling than to look with a strong magnifying glass at an insect so tiny that the naked eye sees only the barest speck and to discover that nevertheless it is sculpted and articulated and striped with the same care and imagination...

Rudolf Arnheim