The inborn capacity to understand through the eyes has been put to sleep and must be reawakened.  This can best be done by handling the pencil, the brush, the chisel.  But here again bad habits and misconceptions will block the path unless there are protection and help.  Inevitably such assistance must come through words, since eyes say little to eyes.  At this point we are stopped by powerful prejudices… It is the purpose of this book to discuss some of the virtues of vision and thereby help refresh and direct them… The exalted kind of seeing that leads to the creation of great art appears as an outgrowth of the humbler and more common activity of the eyes in everyday life. [p. vi-viii]

Rudolf Arnheim. Art and Visual Perception: A Psychology of the Creative Eye. University of California Press, Berkeley, CA 94720, U.S.A., 1954.