Rudolf Arnheim Quotes

Rudolf Arnheim (26)

Birth:	15th July, 1904
Death:	9th June, 2007
Nationality:	American, German
Profession:	Author, Theorist

About

Rudolf Arnheim was a German-born author, art and film theorist and perceptual psychologist. He himself said that his major books are Art and Visual Perception: A Psychology of the Creative Eye, Visual Thinking, and The Power of the Center: A Study of Composition in the Visual Arts, but it is Art and Visual Perception for which he was most widely known.

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• 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

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Theory

• 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

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Culture, Reflection, Human, Demand

• 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

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Organization, Young, Mind

• Order is a necessary condition for anything the human mind is to understand.

  Rudolf Arnheim

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Condition, Understand, Necessary, Order

• 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

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Today, Trouble, Universe, Longer

• 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

  Topics in Nature

  Tags in General, Time, Principle

• Good art theory must smell of the studio, although its language should differ from the household talk of painters and sculptors.

  Rudolf Arnheim

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Good, Language

• 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

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Information, Just

• 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

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Property, Manner

• 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

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Happens, Morning, Remember

• 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

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Simplest, World, Man

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

  Rudolf Arnheim

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Observation, Invention, Thinking

• 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

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Change, Point, Beautiful, Simplicity

• All perceiving is also thinking, all reasoning is also intuition, all observation is also invcention.

  Rudolf Arnheim

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Intuition, Perception, Observation, Reason

• 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

  Topics in Work

  Tags in Function, Machine, Condition, Necessary

• 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

  Topics in Country

  Tags in School, Promise

• 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

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Scale, Like

• 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

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Possess, American, Expected

• 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

  Topics in Society

  Tags in American, Time

• 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

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Tendency, School