Variety is more than a means of avoiding boredom, since art is more than an entertainment of the senses.
Good art theory must smell of the studio, although its language should differ from the household talk of painters and sculptors.
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.
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.
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.
Art is continually working to take the crust of familiarity off everyday objects.
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.
Order is a necessary condition for anything the human mind is to understand.
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.
In many instances, order is apprehended first of all by the senses.
Now equilibrium is the very opposite of disorder.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
Seeing consists of the grasping of structural features rather than the indiscriminate recording of detail.
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.
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.