Top 40 Rudolf Arnheim Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “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

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

— Rudolf Arnheim

3. “Art is continually working to take the crust of familiarity off everyday objects.”

— Rudolf Arnheim

4. “Variety is more than a means of avoiding boredom, since art is more than an entertainment of the senses.”

— Rudolf Arnheim

5. “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

6. “Now equilibrium is the very opposite of disorder.”

— Rudolf Arnheim

7. “Every act is a visual judgement.”

— Rudolf Arnheim

8. “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

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

— Rudolf Arnheim

10. “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

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

— Rudolf Arnheim

12. “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

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

— Rudolf Arnheim

14. “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

15. “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

16. “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

17. “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

18. “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

19. “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.”

— Rudolf Arnheim

20. “The least touchable object in the world is the eye.”

— Rudolf Arnheim

21. “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

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22. “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

23. “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

24. “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

25. “Our experiences and ideas tend to be common but not deep, or deep but not common.”

— Rudolf Arnheim

26. “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

27. “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

28. “A revolution must aim at the destruction of the given order and will succeed only by asserting an order of its own.”

— Rudolf Arnheim

29. “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

30. “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

31. “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

32. “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

Featured in: Firsts Quotes

33. “Would there be any truth in saying that psychology was created by the sophists to sow distrust between man and his world?”

— Rudolf Arnheim

34. “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

35. “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

36. “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

37. “Order is a necessary condition for anything the human mind is to understand.”

— Rudolf Arnheim

38. “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

39. “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

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

— Rudolf Arnheim

41. “The mere exposure to masterworks does not suffice. Too many persons visit museums and collect picture books without ever gaining access to art. The inborn capacity to understand through the eyes has been put to sleep and must be reawakened. This is best accomplished by handling pencils, brushes, chisels and perhaps cameras.”

— Rudolf Arnheim

42. “In many instances, order is apprehended first of all by the senses.”

— Rudolf Arnheim

Featured in: Firsts Quotes

43. “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

44. “Order is a prerequisite of survival; therefore the impulse to produce orderly arrangements is inbred by evolution.”

— Rudolf Arnheim

45. “Seeing consists of the grasping of structural features rather than the indiscriminate recording of detail.”

— Rudolf Arnheim