Abstract Thought Quotes

#1. In a setting of formal education, one would imagine that abstract thought would be encouraged, and that questioning obvious errors within the current system wouldn't be frowned upon. Wrong again; these cunts are out to protect their pocket books and paradigms.

Scott Parker

#2. Jerking off the universe is perhaps what all philosophy, all abstract thought is about: an intense, and not very sociable pleasure, which has to be repeated again and again.

Susan Sontag

#3. On an incredibly simplistic level, you can think of depression as occurring when your cortex thinks an abstract thought and manages to convince the rest of the brain that this is as real as a physical stressor.

Robert M. Sapolsky

#4. As you see, I do not treat the creation of fiction, that to say the invention and development of fantasies, as a form of abstract thought. I don't wish to deny the uses of the intellect, but sometimes one has the intuition that the intellect by itself will lead one nowhere.

J.M. Coetzee

#5. You have something that exists in your head, and getting that abstract thought from your head into something that actually exists is a difficult process.

Lazaro Hernandez

#6. Reality is infinitely diverse, compared with even the subtlest conclusions of abstract thought, and does not allow of clear-cut and sweeping distinctions. Reality resists classification.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky

#7. Critical (i.e., separating) methods apply only to the world-as-nature. It would be easier to break up a theme of Beethoven with dissecting knife or acid than to break up the soul by methods of abstract thought . Nature-knowledge and man-knowledge have neither ways nor aims in common.

Oswald Spengler

#8. You've got a lot of time for abstract thought when you've got your hand stuck up a dead badger.

Terry Pratchett

#9. I love the idea of leaving some of the original abstract thought in, because the problem is that when you pick up a pen you become a snob, your own worse critic. You edit yourself in a way that is non-creative.

Glen Hansard

#10. 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

#11. 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

#12. I couldn't be Susan Sontag. I'm not very good with abstract thought. I always just take to the emotional core of me.

Sally Mann

#13. Americans have no capacity for abstract thought, and make bad coffee.

Georges Clemenceau

#14. To those who have exhausted politics, nothing remains but abstract thought.

Honore De Balzac

#15. patients with aphasia and left-hemisphere lesions, says they have lost 'abstract' and 'propositional' thought - and compares them with dogs (or, rather, he compares dogs to patients with aphasia).

Oliver Sacks

#16. Lenin thought abstract art was a conspiracy by the bourgeois to demoralize the proletariat. Yeah, socialist realism!

Carl Andre

#17. Myth is the isthmus which connects the peninsular world of thought with that vast continent we really belong to. It is not, like truth, abstract; nor is it, like direct experience, bound to the particular.

C.S. Lewis

#18. I thought you saw meaning in that sort of thing," said Vorkosigan.
"In the abstract. Most days it's just stumbling around in the dark with the rest of creation, smashing into things and wondering why it hurts.

Lois McMaster Bujold

#19. When I examine myself and my methods of thought, I come to the conclusion that the gift of fantasy has meant more to me than any talent for abstract, positive thinking.

Albert Einstein

#20. The mind is inherently embodied.
Thought is mostly unconscious.
Abstract concepts are largely metaphorical.

George Lakoff

#21. The abstract way we think is really grounded in the concrete, bodily world much more than we thought.

John Bargh

#22. All individual thought is dissolved in universal thought, as all form is dissolved in the universal plastic means of Abstract-Real painting.

Piet Mondrian

#23. When she was fifteen if you'd told her that when she was twenty she'd be going to bed with bald-headed men and liking it, she would have thought you very abstract.

H.G.Wells

#24. Screenwriting is always about what people say or do, whereas good writing is about a thought process or an abstract image or an internal monologue, none of which works on screen.

David Nicholls

#25. I've not seen an effective manager or leader who can't spend some fraction of time down in the trenches ... If they don't do that they get out of touch with reality, and their whole thought and management process becomes abstract and disconnected.

Jeff Bezos

#26. Most people would have found it grotesque, but when you're in love nothing is so abstract or horrible that it can't be thought of as cute.

David Sedaris

#27. I loved surrealism and abstract painting, and anything related to those. I always thought painting was the highest form of art. What led me to drawing was seeing so much self-important, pretentious, conceptual-type art in university. I wanted to reject that by making quick, fun art.

Neil Farber

#28. What interested me was dance - the way that it was constructed with time-space constructions, and that it was abstract. I always thought: 'Why couldn't theater be that way? Or an opera?'

Robert Wilson

#29. Clive thought of his work in totality, of how varied and rich it seemed whenever he was able to raise his head and take the long perspective, how it represented in abstract a whole history of his lifetime. And still so much to do.

Ian McEwan

#30. One's mind and the earth are in a constant state of erosion, mental rivers wear away abstract banks, brain waves undermine cliffs of thought, ideas decompose into stones of unknowing, and conceptual crystallizations break apart into deposits of gritty reason.

Robert Smithson

#31. I had never thought that I would be involved in narrative structures. As a young guy, I was more interested in abstract modeling. But as I got older, I began to see that there was no reason to limit myself to any intellectual or conceptual postulate, when in fact I'm a professional student of music.

Anthony Braxton

#32. I thought, enough of this, I'm not an abstract painter, what the hell am I going to do? Should I get a job in a shoe store, sell real estate, or what? I was really depressed by the whole thing, because I felt like a painter, yet I couldn't make paintings.

Ralph Goings

#33. Whoever thought the immediate alternates with the immediate action is not an abstract painter.

Pierre Alechinsky

#34. The narrative oftentimes is that everything that comes out of the hood is 'real,' and so I thought, 'I'll base it on the absurd, the not real. I'll twist the idea of real on its head and see if I can get away with it. I'll make paintings that come not from a place but through an abstract gaze.'

Mark Bradford

#35. Nobody really thinks who does not abstract from that which is given, who does not relate the facts to the factors which have made them, who does not in his mind undo the facts. Abstractness is the very life of thought, the token of its authenticity.

Herbert Marcuse

#36. The string connecting everything real and abstract in the universe is entangled in a thought and knotted in an idea.

Alvin Conway

#37. What if a girl grew up like a boy, with marriage an abstract, someday thought, a thing to think about when she became an adult, a thing she could do, or not do, depending? What would that look and feel like?

Anonymous

#38. I have always, privately and humbly, thought it a pity that so good a word [as culture] should go out of the best vocabularies; for when you lose an abstract term, you are apt to lose the thing it stands for.

Katharine Fullerton Gerould

#39. He spent the afternoon watching the indicator light turn from red to orange to green and thought about how useless it was to be angry at anybody about an abstract principle ... How could any idea that drives a man away from the people who love him be considered sound?

Ryan Boudinot

#40. 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

#41. I thought of a labyrinth of labyrinths, of one sinuous spreading labyrinth that would encompass the past and the future ... I felt myself to be, for an unknown period of time, an abstract perceiver of the world.

Jorge Luis Borges

#42. God was some fuzzy, abstract triangle beyond my comprehension. I honestly thought that it was supposed to be that way.

G. Nieves

#43. Art comes into being in that abstract interval between a thought and reality, and no one - not even the artist who created it - can remeasure the influences that caused it.

Edgar Alwin Payne

#44. Sometimes Harry thought the deepest split in his personality wasn't anything to do with his dark side; rather it was the divide between the altruistic and forgiving Abstract Reasoning Harry, versus the frustrated and angry Harry In The Moment.

Eliezer Yudkowsky

#45. 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

#46. Sawbeaked epitome of bodiless Idea, tossed by gusts of ether, dive Through abstract mists and raid the sea of fact Eat rich strange fish, grow long bright feathers, press Form's flesh around thought's rib, and so derive From the act of beauty, beauty of the act.

Philip Jose Farmer

#47. Christ did not found an abstract religion, a mere school of religious thought. He setup a community of apostles, of teachers, with the task of spreading His message and so giving rise to a society of believers: His Church. He promised the Spirit of truth to His Church and then sent Him.

Pope Paul VI