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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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