Rudolf Arnheim Quotes
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A revolution must aim at the destruction of the given order and will succeed only by asserting an order of its own.
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Form is sometimes considered a mere spice added by the artist to the representation of objects in order to make it pleasurable.
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The arts are neglected because they are based on perception, and perception is disdained because it is not assumed to involve thought.
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From building a fire one can learn something about artistic composition. If you use only small kindling and large logs, the fire will quickly eat up the small pieces but will not become strong enough to attack the large ones. You must supply a scale of sizes from the smallest to the largest. The human eye also will not make its way into a painting or building unless a continuum of shapes leads from the small to the large, from the large to the small.
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Order is a prerequisite of survival; therefore the impulse to produce orderly arrangements is inbred by evolution.
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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.
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In many instances, order is apprehended first of all by the senses.
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Now equilibrium is the very opposite of disorder.
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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.
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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.
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Art is continually working to take the crust of familiarity off everyday objects.
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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.
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All perceiving is also thinking, all reasoning is also intuition, all observation is also invention.
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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.
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Orderliness by itself is not sufficient to account for the nature of organized systems in general or for those created by man in particular. Mere orderliness leads to increasing impoverishment and finally to the lowest possible level of structure, no longer clearly distinguishable from chaos, which is the absence of order. A counterprinciple is needed, to which orderliness is secondary. It must supply what is to be ordered.
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In a land of immigrants, one was not an alien but simply the latest arrival.
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Would there be any truth in saying that psychology was created by the sophists to sow distrust between man and his world?
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The least touchable object in the world is the eye.
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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.
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Variety is more than a means of avoiding boredom, since art is more than an entertainment of the senses.
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Both art and science are bent on the understanding of the forces that shape existence, and both call for a dedication to what is. Neither of them can tolerate capricious subjectivity because both are subject to their criteria of truth. Both require precision, order, and discipline because no comprehensible statement can be made without these. Both accept the sensory world as what the Middle Ages called signatura regrum, the signature of things, but in quite different ways.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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It is good to live in a country where all are immigrants ... the newcomer is simply the latest arrival.
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Good art theory must smell of the studio, although its language should differ from the household talk of painters and sculptors.
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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.
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Every act is a visual judgement.
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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.
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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.
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