10 Quotes by Heinrich Wölfflin

... we animate every object. This is a basic instinct in man... Will this instinct ever die out? I believe not. It would be the death of art.

The ideal of “working exactly” is also inherent in the historical disciplines. Art historians pursue it, above all, in order to avoid the baleful contact with aesthetics; and often exert themselves merely to say what happened after what– and nothing more than that.

architecture cannot express specific emotions that are manifested in particular organs. Nor should it try to do so. Its object remains the great existential feelings, the emotions that posit the stable and constant condition of the body

One can work with exactitude only where it is possible to capture the flow of phenomena in fixed forms. Mechanics, for instance, provides physics with such fixed forms. The humanities are still without this foundation; it can only be sought in psychology.

The pulse of the age must be sought elsewhere: in the minor decorative arts, in the lines of ornament, in lettering, and so on.

Forms acquire meaning for us only because we recognize in them the expression of a sentient (fühlend) soul. Spontaneously, we animate (beseelen) every object.

Whoever is unable to stop thinking about himself for a while will never enjoy a work of art, let alone be able to create one.

... the impression made by architecture, far from being something like visual tallying, essentially consists of an unmediated bodily feeling

we judge the existential feeling of architectural forms by the physical responses we make to them.