Conceptual Quotes

#1. Music bypasses the conceptual mind. Music does not give you food for thought ...

Eckhart Tolle

#2. The term "paradigm," from the Greek paradeigma ("pattern"), was used by Kuhn to denote a conceptual framework shared by a community of scientists and providing them with model problems and solutions

Fritjof Capra

#3. John Baldessari, the 79-year-old conceptualist, has spent more than four decades making laconic, ironic conceptual art-about-art, both good and bad.

Jerry Saltz

#4. Conceptual art is entirely word-bound. It is, in fact, the kind of art that is exhausted in its verbal description.

Alexander Stoddart

#5. All art (after Duchamp) is conceptual (in nature) because art only exists conceptually.

Joseph Kosuth

#6. Hasten Little Maiden
...
stop and listen
for pearls of wisdom
stop and listen
as the river glistens ...

Muse

#7. It would be obvious for me to do conceptual art, and I think I've done it already with smashing bass guitars and whatever - I consider that as conceptual.

Paul Simonon

#8. When your sense of self is no longer tied to thought, is no longer conceptual, there is a depth of feeling, of sensing, of compassion, of loving, that was not there when you were trapped in mental concepts. You are that depth.

Eckhart Tolle

#9. I'm a very conceptual writer.

Macklemore

#10. Every religion is the product of the conceptual mind attempting to describe the mystery.

Ram Dass

#11. Among nonclassical ions the ratio of conceptual difficulty to molecular weight reaches a maximum with the cyclopropylcarbinyl-cyclobutyl system.

Paul Doughty Bartlett

#12. There is no unthreatened, unthreatening conceptual home for the concept of gay origins. We have all the more reason, then, to keep our understanding of gay origin, of gay cultural and material reproduction, plural, multi-capillaried, argus-eyed, respectful, and endlessly cherished.

Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick

#13. Space is a unifying field of awareness in which you meet the other person without the separative barriers created by conceptual thinking. And now the other person is no longer 'other.' In that space, you are joined together as one awareness, one consciousness.

Eckhart Tolle

#14. I started philosophy looking for answers. But along the way I came to prize exploring the questions. Progress in philosophy consists, I think, in a clearer delineation of the conceptual options, not in reaching determinate conclusions.

Kwame Anthony Appiah

#15. We're in a post-conceptual era where it's really the artist's idea and vision that are prized rather than the ability to master the crafts that support the work. Today, our understanding of an artist is closer to a philosopher than to a craftsman.

Jeffrey Deitch

#16. When an artist uses a conceptual form of art, it means that all of the planning and decisions are made beforehand and the execution is a perfunctory affair. The idea becomes a machine that makes the art.

Sol LeWitt

#17. My conceptual framework, which basically emphasizes the importance of misconceptions, makes me extremely critical of my own decisions. I know that I am bound to be wrong, and therefore am more likely to correct my own mistakes.

George Soros

#18. To reject practice by saying, 'it is conceptual!' is the path of fools. A tendency of the inexperienced and something to be avoided.

Longchenpa

#19. If you don't believe in God, then the God concept is a great placeholder for everything we don't know, which is exponentially more than we do know.

Bryant McGill

#20. I have never understood, for instance, why some people see contemporary art as divided between 'painting' and 'conceptual art', as though this represented a genuine division.

Michael Craig-Martin

#21. However, in modern conceptual frameworks there is a more sophisticated view. I would say that the act of music exists in several worlds simultaneously.

Robert Fripp

#22. It is a distinction, instead, between two entirely different kinds of reality, belonging to two entirely disparate conceptual orders. In fact, the very division between monotheism and polytheism is in many cases a confusion of categories.

David Bentley Hart

#23. Poetry offers a way of understanding and expressing existence that is fundamentally different from conceptual thought.

Dana Gioia

#24. I refer to what I do as 'conceptual portraits,' meaning that I come up with an idea or concept that I would like to explore, and then I find people that fit that idea.

Alix Smith

#25. Attention is the vital thing and there is no tension in attention. It just happens to be a similar word. It's not concentration or straining. Attention has the openness of a young child not yet dominated by the conceptual mind.

Eckhart Tolle

#26. The benefit of such horizontal interactions - people sharing knowledge across fields - is that it encourages conceptual blending, which is an extremely important part of the insight process.

Jonah Lehrer

#27. People in love, it is well known, suffer extreme conceptual delusions, the most common of these being that other people find your condition as thrilling and eye-watering as you do yourselves.

Julian Barnes

#28. I make no apology for preoccupying myself with architecture, television, conceptual art, restaurants and Jane Asher's cakes.

Will Self

#29. Reading and writing are solitary activities that increase a person's capacity for concentration, awareness, and conceptual thought as the person weaves immediate information with stored memories.

Kilroy J. Oldster

#30. ideology signifies a phenomenon intermediate between a simple lie at one pole, and an error, which is the result of a distorted and faulty conceptual apparatus, at the other.

Karl Mannheim

#31. I have been known as the minimal and conceptual artist for over five decades. I think I haven't changed much.

Yoko Ono

#32. Myth isn't about factual or historical truth, but about a deeper truth. In ancient times, people saw myth in a very different light - as a vehicle that can transmit and carry a subtlety and richness of experience that simply cannot be conveyed by linear, conceptual forms of language.

Adyashanti

#33. I spent a lot of time on my own working out the physical vocabulary for how Gollum moved. As I say, I drew on a lot of Tolkein's descriptions of how he moves, but also the conceptual artist sketches.

Andy Serkis

#34. Masters are not experts because they take a subject to its conceptual end. They are masters because they realize that there isn't one. On utterly smooth ground, the path from aim to attainment is in the permanent future.

Sarah Lewis

#35. Dogmas are collective conceptual prisons. And the strange thing is that people love their prison cells because they give them a sense of security and a false sense of 'I know.' Nothing has inflicted more suffering on humanity than its dogmas.

Eckhart Tolle

#36. I much prefer a plotted novel to a novel that is really conceptual.

Eleanor Catton

#37. Both European and American historians have done away with any conceptual limits on what in the past needs and deserves investigating. The result, among other things, has been a flood of works on gender history, black history, and ethnic history of all kinds.

Edmund Morgan

#38. The world of enlightenment doesn't know of its own existence. We're beyond both the knower and known. There's no conceptual identity whatsoever.

Frederick Lenz

#39. Our Parusa or Universal Soul is an abiding reality. It is logical, but remains conceptual to our minds under we experience it;s realization within ourselves.

B.K.S. Iyengar

#40. At the beginning of each year, we have conceptual meetings. How are we going to challenge ourselves this year? So we suggested a transsexual or transgender. And to be honest, I am shocked they let us do it.

Jai Rodriguez

#41. All that philosophers have handled for millennia has been conceptual mummies; nothing actual has ever escaped from their hands alive.

Friedrich Nietzsche

#42. We need to remind ourselves that contemporary art is first of all a form of conceptual gymnastics, in which we learn to coexist with what we don't understand.

Massimiliano Gioni

#43. I think the term 'conceptual art' is a useful term for writers, a basket to put people in, like Pop Art or Impressionism or whatever.

John Baldessari

#44. A good programming language is a conceptual universe for thinking about programming.

Alan Perlis

#45. When I go to galleries in New York, I feel like I'm in school. I know that there's good contemporary conceptual art, but I have a really hard time caring about it. I'd rather look at images of people and things I can relate to. Then again, I didn't go to art school.

Kyp Malone

#46. The conceptual and politically-driven art so popular and considered to be the forefront of contemporary art today is limited by its topicality and will lose its 'punch' when topical concerns move on to other interests.

Scott Kahn

#47. Philosophy has a great sort of appeal in terms of an artistic or aesthetic organization of concepts. It's a conceptual art.

William H Gass

#48. Citizen's Band radio renders one accessible to a wide variety of people from all walks of life. It should not be forgotten that all walks of life include conceptual artists, dry cleaners, and living poets.

Fran Lebowitz

#49. Western philosophy, then, is not an extended debate about knowledge, ethics, and reality, but a succession of conceptual metaphors. Descartes's philosophy is based on KNOWING IS SEEING, Locke's on the MIND IS A CONTAINER, Kant's on MORALITY IS A STRICT FATHER, and so on.

Steven Pinker

#50. I just happened to start playing music for the conceptual ideas.

Kim Gordon

#51. The great German idealists from Kant to Hegel saw this idealism or nihilism as a reductio ad absurdum of any philosophy, and so they struggled by all conceptual means to avoid it.

Frederick C. Beiser

#52. Sex is now a conceptual act, it's probably only in terms of the perversions that we can make contact with each other at all.

J.G. Ballard

#53. I do tend to look at my books in many ways as conceptual fiction, even to the point where I think the author's photograph is part of the package. And I have gone out of my way to select the photograph to connect to the subject matter of each book.

Bret Easton Ellis

#54. Once we have a nice, conceptual sketch and rendering and design approved, then it's really about pinpointing what's functional and what's not, because functional equals expensive.

James Pearse Connelly

#55. In some ways, all our experiences of God are beyond belief, because all conceptual beliefs pale when compared to the experiential reality.

Bernadette Roberts

#56. I venture to define science as a series of interconnected concepts and conceptual schemes arising from experiment and observation and fruitful of further experiments and observations. The test of a scientific theory is, I suggest, its fruitfulness.

James Bryant Conant

#57. I was excited about the fourth movie I guess conceptually because, what I felt we should do it, we should try to make it a conceptual jump like Terminator did to T2. It was still the Terminator franchise, but it was something kind of bigger and grander.

Paul W. S. Anderson

#58. A conceptual scheme is never discarded merely because of a few stubborn facts with which it cannot be reconciled; a conceptual scheme is either modified or replaced by a better one, never abandoned with nothing left to take its place.

James Bryant Conant

#59. Perhaps the most concise summary of enlightenment would be: transcending dualism ... Dualism is the conceptual division of the world into categories ... human perception is by nature a dualistic phenomenon which makes the quest for enlightenment an uphill struggle, to say the least.

Douglas Hofstadter

#60. There is no rule that is true under all circumstances, for this is the real and not a statistical world. Because the statistical method shows only the average aspects, it creates an artificial and predominantly conceptual picture of reality.

C. G. Jung

#61. Eventually I realized that for contemporary philosophers conceptual analysis per se was an end in itself. For some, it was somehow supposed to lead to the truth about these phenomena, not just to tidy things up a bit.

Patricia Churchland

#62. Once introduced discontinuity, once challenge any of the properties of visual space, and as they flow from each other, the whole conceptual framework collapses.

Marshall McLuhan

#63. Conceptual integrity is the most important consideration in system design.

Fred Brooks

#64. A witness can be of more value than a policy analyst. An amateur witness, free of conceptual bias, sometimes sees the plainest truth. One should never be blinded by tailoring.

Andrew Solomon

#65. We are living a life full of first experiences, from a first kiss, to the first time giving blood, to conceptual and philosophical explanations of humanity's firsts.

Kat Lahr

#66. We imagine that our theological/conceptual systems are the means by which we know God as God is. I truly believe that such postures and perspectives put us in danger of conceptual idolatry, worshiping our ideas of and frameworks for God.

Tim Keel

#67. The best programmers are not marginally better than merely good ones. They are an order-of-magnitude better, measured by whatever standard: conceptual creativity, speed, ingenuity of design, or problem-solving ability.

Randall E. Stross

#68. We have no general conceptual thrust for the band, other than trying to make music that keeps our interest. When things are novel, they are probably things we have discovered by accident or investigation rather than by design.

Steve Albini

#69. I have an unusual type of thinking. I have no visual memory whatsoever. Everything is conceptual to me.

Craig Venter

#70. Once one crosses a conceptual threshold of rethinking what nature might or might not be, it can multiply outward radically. The world becomes a more interesting place to be, and one is perhaps somewhat less judgmental.

Michael Light

#71. All organizations are merely conceptual embodiments of a very old, very basic idea - the idea of community. They can be no more or less than the sum of the beliefs of the people drawn to them; of their character, judgements, acts and efforts.

Dee Hock

#72. The traveller must, of course, always be cautious of the overly broad generalisation. But I am an American, and a paucity of data does not stop me from making sweeping, vague, conceptual statements and, if necessary, following these statements up with troops.

George Saunders

#73. I thought it was a wonderfully conceptual act actually, to fire a replica pistol at a figurehead - the guy could have been working for Andy Warhol!

J.G. Ballard

#74. The argument is made that naming God is never really naming God but only naming our understanding of God. To take our ideas of the divine and hold them as if they correspond to the reality of God is thus to construct a conceptual idol built from the materials of our mind.

Peter Rollins

#75. If the original essence of the thing which we fear could confidently lodge itself within us by its own authority it would be the same in all men. For all men are of the same species and, in varying degrees, are all furnished with the same conceptual tools and instruments of judgement.

Michel De Montaigne

#76. Flames moved towards him
and dropped within
-
singed and marred
his tender skin ...
(the frightful plight tale)

Muse

#77. I try to look at design from a more conceptual standpoint.

Cynthia Rowley

#78. 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

#79. What is the conceptual tie that binds anxiety and planning? Both, of course, are intimately connected to thinking about the future.

Daniel M. Gilbert

#80. Art is supposed to be about creativity. But the same people are the same art darlings every month, and it's a bit annoying. It's supposed to be diverse and interesting and conceptual and have weird concepts in a comfortable place.

M.I.A.

#81. Were a language ever completely "grammatical" it would be a perfect engine of conceptual expression. Unfortunately, or luckily, no language is tyrannically consistent. All grammars leak.

Edward Sapir

#82. I always thought there was a - even in the most, quote, "conceptual art," there is always a physical aspect to it. I never knew what the term meant.

Robert Barry

#83. All ideologies are idiotic, whether religious or political, for it is conceptual thinking, the conceptual word, which has so unfortunately divided man.

Jiddu Krishnamurti

#84. The artist himself is actually the subject in everything after, say, 1900. Eventually, art becomes so removed from the community that you have to know about the artist before you can even look at the painting, because there is a conceptual idea going on.

Gus Van Sant

#85. Whatever your supposed politics are - left, right - if you put it in a human connection, most people will rise to the occasion and feel the human pain in a way that they might not if it was presented in a more conceptual way.

George Saunders

#86. Everything - the uncanny clarity of my vision, the clearness of my thoughts as pure conceptual flow - suggested higher, not lower, brain functioning.

Eben Alexander

#87. Ai Weiwei, who is both a widely admired conceptual artist and a fearless human-rights activist, has been on the bad side of the Chinese government for years.

Terry Teachout

#88. Magick is not created by man, it is a part of man, having its basis in the structure of his brain, his body and his nervous system in their relations to his conceptual universe, the matrix of thought, and of speech, the mother of thought.

John Parsons

#89. When students learn to wrestle with questions about purpose, audience, and genre, they develop a conceptual view of writing that has lifelong usefulness in any communicative context.

John C. Bean

#90. Didn't know what was important and what was trivial. They couldn't remember what mattered. Without a conceptual framework in which to embed what they were learning, they were effectively amnesics.

Joshua Foer

#91. We had to do the same thing here. To top that sequel was quite a task. Mike had a couple of good conceptual humour and character ideas, which got me back into it.

Jay Roach

#92. Thinking fragments reality - it cuts it up into conceptual bits and pieces.

Eckhart Tolle

#93. I'm not knocking conceptual art; it's another department, but it doesn't move me like painting.

Paul Simonon

#94. I work on fittings, mostly. You know, I sketch less and less in my work. I sketch for the show sometimes, but then it becomes more conceptual. But when I don't sketch, it becomes more pragmatic.

Alber Elbaz

#95. Especially for fostering creative, conceptual work, the best way to use money as a motivator is to take the issue of money off the table so people concentrate on the work.

Daniel H. Pink

#96. All of my favourite albums have this incredible amount of conceptual glue to them, even if they are not telling a story.

Gerard Way

#97. In some ways Lawler is a conceptual Diane Arbus. She's a stalker who takes advantage of situations. She pulls back curtains, causing normal things to look freakish and the freakish to turn mundane.

Jerry Saltz

#98. Get too conceptual, too cute and remote, and your characters die on the page.

Thomas Pynchon

#99. I think a conceptual idea comes to me first - something I've been mulling over a lot right before I feel like writing a book - and then the characters start to develop around it.

Andrea Seigel

#100. The Dark Side of the Moon is a fine album with a textural and conceptual richness that not only invites, but demands involvement. There is a certain grandeur.

Alan Parsons