List of Rudolf Arnheim Quotes

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.

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.

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.

In Many Instances, Order Is Apprehended First Of All By The Senses.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Now The Work Of Art Also Represents A State Of Final Equilibrium, Of Accomplished Order And Maximum Relative Entropy, And There Are Those Who Resent It. But Art Is Not Meant To Stop The Stream Of Life. Within A Narrow Span Of Duration And Space The Work Of Art Concentrates A View Of The Human Condition; And Sometimes It Marks The Steps Of Progression, Just As A Man Climbing The Dark Stairs Of A Medieval Tower Assures Himself By The Changing Sights Glimpsed Through Its Narrow Windows That He Is Getting Somewhere After All.

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.