Top 100 Abstract Of Quotes
#1. Also essential to math is the sense in which abstracting something can mean reducing it to its absolute skeletal essence, as in the abstract of an article or book. As such, it can mean thinking hard about things that for the most part people can't think hard about-because it drives them crazy.
David Foster Wallace
#2. Time, that most abstract of humanity's homes.
W.G. Sebald
#3. Psychology is a condensed version of mindset; whereas philosophy is an abstract of the human society.
Pearl Zhu
#4. Sophie Germain proved to the world that even a woman can accomplish something in the most rigorous and abstract of sciences and for that reason would well have deserved an honorary degree.
Carl Friedrich Gauss
#6. It's not about facts, it's about feelings. It's about remembering feelings and happiness. A definition of art is that it makes concrete our most subtle emotions. I think the highest form of art is music. It's the most abstract of all art expression.
Agnes Martin
#7. We must trust infinitely to the beneficent necessity which shines through all laws. Human nature expresses itself in them as characteristically as in statues, or songs, or railroads, and an abstract of the codes of nations would be an abstract of the common conscience.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#8. Music is the most abstract of the arts; dance, the most concrete.
Marty Rubin
#9. Don't allow people to define you based on reading the abstract of your story without even reading chapter 1. Continue to write the remaining chapters.
Assegid Habtewold
#10. Friendship's an abstract of this noble flame, 'Tis love refin'd, and purged from all its dross, 'Tis next to angel's love, if not the same, As strong in passion is, though not so gross.
Katherine Philips
#11. Knowledge was the great thing
not abstract knowledge in which Dr. Forester had been so rich, the theories which lead one enticingly on with their appearance of nobility, of transcendent virtue, but detailed, passionate, trivial human knowledge.
Graham Greene
#12. Music is at once the most wonderful, the most alive of all the arts- it is the most abstract, the most perfect, the most pure- and the most sensual. I listen with my body and it is my body that aches in response to the passion and pathos embodied in this music.
Susan Sontag
#13. There is only one ' principle that can preserve a free society: namely, the strict prevention of all coercion except in the enforcement of general abstract rules equally applicable to all.
Friedrich August Von Hayek
#14. No cause, no God, no abstract idea can justify the mass slaughter of innocents.
Edward Said
#15. Probably no branch of mathematics has experienced a more surprising growth than has ... topology ... Considered as a most specialized and abstract subject in the early 1920's, it is today [1938] an indispensable equipment for the investigation of modern mathematical theories.
Raymond Louis Wilder
#16. As exchange-values, all commodities are merely definite quantities of congealed labour-time.
Karl Marx
#17. We believe more readily in the abstract application of God's promises than we do in their application to us personally.
Matt Chandler
#18. The more chaos there is, the more science holds on to abstract systems of control, and the more chaos is engendered.
William Irwin Thompson
#19. I've always assumed that the abstract qualities of [my] photographs are obvious. For instance, I can turn them upside down and they're still interesting to me as pictures. If you turn a picture that's not well organized upside down, it won't work.
William Eggleston
#20. Part of what I love about games is that, even if you're best friends with somebody, it gives you these sort of moments where you get to interact on a completely different level. You all agree to these abstract rules, but there's nobody holding a gun to your head.
Rich Sommer
#21. Acts which are essentially dishonourable must not be done; they would be justified only by calm contemplation of their correctness in abstract cases.
Aleister Crowley
#22. The meaning of fiction is not abstract meaning but experienced meaning.
Flannery O'Connor
#23. I am not a follower of Monet. I am not an admirer or follower of De Kooning. I am not an action painter. I am not an abstract expressionist. I am not younger or older. I will not take my hat off to any other artist living or dead in all the world. I know this.
Milton Resnick
#24. I would put myself in the attitude to look in the eye an abstract truth, and I cannot. I blench and withdraw on this side and on that. I seem to know what he meant who said, No man can see God face to face and live.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#25. Often kids in a computer lab learn about word-processing, but if they want to write an essay, they write it by hand. This is exactly the opposite of what you want them to learn. They're approaching the computer as just another abstract school subject.
Seymour Papert
#26. Children learned about the adult world by participating in it in a small way, by doing a little work and making a little money - a much more effective, because pleasurable, and a much cheaper method than the present one of requiring the adult world to be learned in the abstract in school. One's
Wendell Berry
#27. The more horrible this world (as today, for instance), the more abstract our art, whereas a happy world brings forth an art of the here and now.
Paul Klee
#28. The movement of abstract art ... bears within itself at almost every point the mark of the changing material and psychological conditions surrounding modern culture.
Meyer Schapiro
#29. The novels have done so well because the drawings are abstract, black-and-white. This adds to the universality of the story. "Persepolis" also has dreamlike moments, and the drawings help maintain cohesion and consistency.
Marjane Satrapi
#30. The process of thinking itself requires us to view the universe in the direction of entropy, since an abstraction always involves information loss, since symbols 'abstract' complexity from observed objects.
John C. Wright
#31. When you're trying to solve a problem on a new product type, you become completely focused on problems that seem a number of steps removed from the main product. That problem solving can appear a little abstract, and it is easy to lose sight of the product.
Jonathan Ive
#32. A list of the thirteen types of photograph (plus an afterthought): Aide-memoire Reportage Work of art Topography Erotica/Pornography Advertisement Abstract image Literature Text Autobiography Compositional Functional illustration Snapshot
William Boyd
#33. The Human subject is the most important thing. My work is abstract in the sense of having been designed and composed, but it is not abstract in the sense of having no human content I want to communicate. I want the idea to strike right away.
Jacob Lawrence
#34. Forgoing outright atrocity, of which there is so much - too much - right now, aren't the 'life,'body,' and 'face' of Michael Jackson in the running for some of the most abstract events of the last century?
Andrew Durbin
#35. With the Larry Bertlemann portrait, I started with a photograph that I could use for it. I built the drawing's identity to serve as a graphic identity. After a number of sketches, I went into my own abstract vernacular of drawn lines and shapes to create the composition for the poster design.
John Van Hamersveld
#36. ArcGIS is an integrated Web GIS that is supported by services. These are abstracted in a geoinformation model that's managed by the portal, and then accessible by a number of apps, which are the growing part of this system.
Jack Dangermond
#37. My thoughts about God are vague and abstract. My connection with the energy of the universe is shaky.
Janet Fitch
#38. It was the point where things became much more abstract and less literal than in the bulk of the film, which was hardcore rockets and space and planets - all a fairly straightforward evolution from what I had been doing before.
Douglas Trumbull
#39. The real question of government versus private enterprise is argued on too philosophical and abstract a basis. Theoretically, planning may be good. But nobody has ever figured out the cause of government stupidity - and until they do (and find the cure), all ideal plans will fall into quicksand.
Richard P. Feynman
#40. There's a tiredness of abstract inteligence, and it's the most horrible of tirednesses. It doesn't weight on you like the tiredness of the body, nor does it worry you like the tiredness of knowledge and emotion. It's a weightiness of the conscience of the world, an inability of the soul to breathe.
Fernando Pessoa
#41. At that point it certainly would be called abstract. That is to say, you had a model and there'd be one or two or three people there drawing the model but otherwise you had abstractions all around the room, even though the model was in front of you.
Lee Krasner
#42. Feelings are intangible," he said. "You can't see them, can't touch them. You can hurt and no one would know. But physical pain is real. You can see blood and broken bones. It's simple in a way feelings are not, and cutting makes the abstract pain of feelings substantial.
Shaun David Hutchinson
#43. My whole existence is governed by abstract ideas ... the ideal must be preserved regardless of fact.
Mary Corinna Putnam Jacobi
#44. What is called happiness is an abstract idea, composed of various ideas of pleasure; for he who has but a moment of pleasure is not a happy man, in like manner that a moment of grief constitutes not a miserable one.
Voltaire
#45. Language is not an abstract construction of the learned, or of dictionary-makers, but is something arising out of the work, needs, ties, joys, affections, tastes, of long generations of humanity, and has its bases broad and low, close to the ground.
Walt Whitman
#46. But the science of operations, as derived from mathematics more especially, is a science of itself, and has its own abstract truth and value; just as logic has its own peculiar truth and value, independently of the subjects to which we may apply its reasonings and processes.
Ada Lovelace
#47. I would like to say to those who think of my pictures as serene, whether in friendship or mere observation, that I have imprisoned the most utter violence in every inch of their surface.
Mark Rothko
#48. I think you have to let go of this idea that you can be precious about everything, and let it be the abstract mess that it is.
Ryan Reynolds
#49. To elevate abstract doctrines and dogmas over living, breathing, embodied experiences of God's love and grace, then, is going the wrong direction. It's taking flesh and turning it back into words.
Rob Bell
#50. A lot of these angles are really about trying to mimic broadcast sports angles in order to anchor the scene, to sort of normalize it before it becomes abstracted.
Matthew Barney
#51. Man is alone everywhere. But the solitude of the Mexican, under the great stone night of the high plateau that is still inhabited by insatiable gods, is very different from that of the North American, who wanders in an abstract world of machines, fellow citizens and moral precepts.
Octavio Paz
#52. These days people believe they can go into art and make a living. We didn't have that. The abstract expressionists were older, by the time they even got a show. Now people come right out of school and sell.
Brice Marden
#53. Dr. P. may therefore serve as a warning and parable -- of what happens to a science which eschews the judgmental, the particular, the personal, and becomes entirely abstract and computational.
Oliver Sacks
#54. To love mankind merely in the abstract", he once said, "is one face of a single coin, and on its other side is hatred of mankind in the abstract. To love in truth is to serve the suffering person before you, and to do what you can to assist him.
Michael D. O'Brien
#55. As Enlightenment philosophers and scholars consciously adopted the methods of science to establish such abstract concepts as rights, liberty, and justice, successive generations have become schooled in thinking of these abstractions as applied to others in matrices-like mental rotations.
Michael Shermer
#56. I know who I was, I can tell you who I may have been, but I am, now, only in this line of words I write.
Ursula K. Le Guin
#57. Nothing in our politics is any longer driven or designed by individual humans who have a name and a face; we have sunk from theism into impersonal and depersonalizing deism, a scheme of rule by alien and implacable abstract metaphysical forces.
Kenny Smith
#58. No gleam of reason, no momentary return to first principles, no abstract asking of any obvious question, can interrupt this mad and monotonous gallop of mere progress by precedent.
G.K. Chesterton
#59. You need language for thought, and you need language to anticipate death. There is no abstract thought without language and no anticipation. I think the anticipation of death without language would be impossible.
David Cronenberg
#60. Through the very culture of representation through form, we have come to see that the abstract - like the mathematical - is actually expressed in and through all things, although not determinately.
Piet Mondrian
#61. A right , in the abstract, is a fact ; it is not a thing to be given, established, or conferred; it is. Of the exercise of a right power may deprive me; of the right itself, never.
Voltairine De Cleyre
#62. The wars of the future will be fought by computer technicians and by lawyers and high-altitude specialists, and that may mean war will be increasingly abstract, hard to think about and hard to control.
Michael Ignatieff
#63. Maybe I was a little jealous or envious of the abstract painters - but the truth was I thought what they were doing was boring.
Larry Rivers
#64. For my own part, I abandon the ethics of duty to the Hegelian critique with no regrets; it would appear to me, indeed, to have been correctly characterized by Hegel as an abstract thought, as a thought of understanding.
Paul Ricoeur
#65. In every landscape should reside jewels of abstract art waiting to be discovered.
Melissa Brown
#66. You sort of underestimate the human being when you say that every least thing that is an abstract experience is spiritual. It isn't. It's just your real self. You can be capable of fantastic abstract experiences, right in this life.
Agnes Martin
#67. We think about the world in all ways we experience it ; we think visually, we think in sign, we think kinesthetically, we think in abstract term, we think in movement. Creativity is the process of having original ideas that have value.
Ken Robinson
#68. A word is an abstract image, the imaginary thing, or, in so far as everything is ultimately an object of the thinking power, it is the imagined thought: hence men, when they know the word, the name for a thing, fancy that they know the thing also.
Ludwig Feuerbach
#69. The goal and meaning of individual life (which is the only real life) no longer lie in individual development but in the policy of the State, which is thrust upon the individual from outside and consists in the execution of an abstract idea which ultimately tends to attract all life to itself.
C. G. Jung
#70. What exclusively determines the magnitude of the value of any article is therefore the amount of labour socially necessary, or the labour-time socially necessary for its production.
Karl Marx
#71. My struggle is to preserve that abstract flash - like something you caught out of the corner of your eye, but in the picture you can look at it directly.
Andrew Wyeth
#72. You're never quite sure where the song is going, because you might not find the word to rhyme with the end of the line. You have to find associative meaning to get you there. So it's rather like doing a crossword puzzle backwards. A kind of strange, three-dimensional, abstract crossword puzzle.
Annie Lennox
#73. In a society where the degradation of man was (and is still) being proclaimed, humans defined in lowly terms, and Deity described as an abstract, impersonal concept, the heavens were opened and God and his Son Jesus Christ appeared to Joseph Smith and taught him the real nature of man. 14.
Gilbert W. Scharffs
#74. America is a simplified ideological abstraction, an emotive symbol represented by other abstract symbols like the flag. It is the object of a faithlike devotion, unencumbered by honest history.
Michael Parenti
#75. I'm this superphilosophical kind of person. Stuck in a prison of abstract ideas and overpowering emotions, I have this personality that makes it really hard to survive.
Natsuo Kirino
#76. In my view, the most damaging evils that are perpetrated upon us are through some abstract notion about good, where we're willing to sacrifice individuals in the present for some great vision of an improved or perfect future.
Gregory Stock
#77. Beauty and happiness and life are all the same and they are pervasive, unattached and abstract and they are our only concern. They are immeasurable, completely lacking in substance. They are perfect and sublime. This is the subject matter of art.
Agnes Martin
#78. Describing comic sensibility is near impossible. It's sort of an abstract silliness, that sometimes the joke isn't the star.
Dana Carvey
#79. The negotiations were simultaneously cerebral and physical, abstract and personal, something like a combination of chess and mountain climbing.
Richard Holbrooke
#80. I think there are a lot of similarities between writing and music. Music is much more direct and much more emotional and that's the level I want to be at when I'm writing. Writing is much more intellectual and indirect and abstract, in a way.
Karl Ove Knausgard
#81. Verse is not written, it is bled; Out of the poet's abstract head. Words drip the poem on the page; Out of his grief, delight and rage.
Paul Engle
#82. From all these facts there emerges a very simple abstract program for the teacher to follow in keeping the attention of the child: Begin with the line of his native interests, and offer him objects that have some immediate connection with these.
William James
#83. I have always tried to keep truth in my photographs. My work, whether realistic or abstract, has always dealt with a form of religion or imagination.
Ralph Eugene Meatyard
#84. The greatest illusion of the abstract ego is that it can do anything to bring about radical improvement either in itself or in the world.
Alan W. Watts
#85. The air-conditioning was more like a vague gesture toward the abstract idea of air-conditioning.
David Foster Wallace
#86. What intrigues me most about the human voice, is its ability to make all things transparent through its power of transformation. The voice is not just a conduit for words. For me it is like an abstract dream in which everything makes perfect sense.
Azam Ali
#87. Moving across levels of the particular and the abstract, trying to avoid a transcendent purchase on the objects of study, we set ourselves up for necessary failure in order to learn how to find our way into post-foundational possibilities.
Patti Lather
#88. The investigations which have seemingly been the most purely abstract have often formed the foundation of the most important changes or improvements in the conditions of human life.
Theodor Svedberg
#89. While those whom devotion to abstract discussions has rendered unobservant of the facts are too ready to dogmatize on the basis of a few observations.
Aristotle.
#90. Soloveitchik's use redeems the word of redemption itself, sweeps away the more abstract and amorphous idea swirling in its wake, and focuses redemption as the right and the ability to control how you tell your
Anonymous
#91. I think, first and foremost, Marie Antoinette was intellectually impoverished. She really had never been introduced to the notion of abstract thinking - of thinking at all in any profound way.
Kathryn Lasky
#92. We don't have to stop inventing abstract models that describe the behavior of imaginary Econs. We do, however, have to stop assuming that those models are accurate descriptions of behavior, and stop basing policy decisions on such flawed analyses.
Richard H. Thaler
#93. 1.A green-glass beanstalk
2.An abstract represenation of a tree
3.A greener, glassier, uglier Washingtong Movement
4. The Jolly Green Giant's gigantic jolly green phallus.
John Green
#94. I am searching for abstract ways of expressing reality, abstract forms that will enlighten my own mystery.
Eric Cantona
#95. I hate crowds and making speeches. I hate facing cameras and having to answer to a crossfire of questions. Why popular fancy should seize upon me, a scientist, dealing in abstract things and happy if left alone, is a manifestation of mass psychology that is beyond me.
Albert Einstein
#96. Fear is the deep motive of abstract art - fear of a repellent civilization which is dominated by the power of things ... who can be surprised if, more sensitive than the others, the artist is terrified by the power things have acquired over us?
Storm Jameson
#97. When I write plays, I'm already seeing the shapes on stage, of the actors and their interaction, and so on and so forth. I don't think I've ever written one play as an abstract piece, as a literary piece, floating in the air somewhere, to be flushed out later on.
Wole Soyinka
#98. I never use nature as a starting point. I never abstract from nature; I never consciously think of nature when I paint.
Adolph Gottlieb
#99. Out of doors one becomes abstract and impersonal.One's individuality absolutely leaves one.
Oscar Wilde
#100. The individual's religion may be egotistic, and those private realities which it keeps in touch with may be narrow enough; but at any rate it always remains infinitely less hollow and abstract, as far as it goes, than a science which prides itself on taking no account of anything private at all.
William James
