Top 100 Conceptual Quotes
#1. We have not begun to understand the relationship between combinatorics and conceptual mathematics.
Jean Dieudonne
#2. In the particular dwells the tawdry. In the conceptual dwells the grand, the transcendent, the everlasting. Earthly countries and single malignant boys can go to hell; the idea of countries and the idea of sons triumph for eternity.
Lionel Shriver
#3. The problem is not software 'friendliness'. It is conceptual clarity. A globe does not say, 'good morning'. It is simple and clear, not 'friendly'.
Ted Nelson
#4. Mature psychological health cannot exist unless we are capable of doubting any form of conceptual certitude about ourselves or anything else.
Richard Moss
#6. Cognitive psychology has shown that the mind best understands facts when they are woven into a conceptual fabric, such as a narrative, mental map, or intuitive theory. Disconnected facts in the mind are like unlinked pages on the Web: They might as well not exist.
Steven Pinker
#7. True philosophical atheism must be regarded as a superstition, often nurtured by an infantile wish to live in a world proportionate to one's own hopes or conceptual limitations.
David Bentley Hart
#8. 'Pure experience' is the name I gave to the immediate flux of life which furnishes the material to our later reflection with its conceptual categories.
William James
#9. One major problem with any science is that people who don't know the conceptual history of their field go round re-inventing the elliptical wheel.
Walter M. Fitch
#10. What makes something simple or complex? It's not the number of dials or controls or how many features it has: It is whether the person using the device has a good conceptual model of how it operates.
Donald A. Norman
#11. In a portrait, you have room to have a point of view and to be conceptual with a picture. The image may not be literally what's going on, but it's representative.
Annie Leibovitz
#12. Conceptual art' is an oxymoron. Concepts are articulations of fact or supposition, not attributes of quality.
Walter Darby Bannard
#13. Conceptual Design If I had an hour to solve a problem I'd spend 55 minutes thinking about the problem and 5 minutes thinking of solutions. - Albert Einstein
Victor Sower
#14. There are two very different types of artists: those I call Old Masters, who work by trial and error and tend to improve with age, and conceptual people, or Young Geniuses, who generally do their best work early in their careers.
David Galenson
#15. Write from truth, write from self.
Writing theory or conceptual writing may be
A way to create new forms or styles but in the end?
The Words Must Be Your Own.
R.M. Engelhardt
#17. It's the ultimate conceptual artwork. I took a piece of metal and just painted an image of a stop sign on it - a four-by-four-foot stop sign.
Josh Smith
#18. Before gathering any data, one must have concepts about the data being gathered. These are conceptual categories, meanings, and relationships that are all pre-empirical. They are purely theoretical. Imagine
Steve Patterson
#19. Great art - or good art - is when you look at it, experience it and it stays in your mind. I don't think conceptual art and traditional art are all that different.
Damien Hirst
#20. There is a slight problem with being a conceptual artist these days: You won't get paid. But this levels the field and takes the art of money out of the field of serious art. The only conceptual artists who would conceive of making money on the Internet are a lowbrow species known as hustlers.
Andrei Codrescu
#21. Artists are most themselves when they are out of their minds, transcending the ego skirmishes of conceptual thought, and intuitively relinquishing control to the greater Creator
Alex Grey
#22. Many philosophers in the second half of the 20th century really seemed to think that they were laying the foundations for science by laying down the conceptual (necessary) truths.
Patricia Churchland
#23. The intellectual life of man consists almost wholly in his substitution of conceptual order for the perceptual order in which his experience originally comes.
William James
#24. All of the significant art of today stems from Conceptual art. This includes the art of installation, political, feminist and socially directed art.
Sol LeWitt
#25. In conceptual art the idea or concept is the most important aspect of the work
Sol LeWitt
#26. Right view is not a concept or belief. ... [It] is simply seeing Reality as it is, here and now, moment after moment[;] ... relying on bare attention ... before conceptual thought arises[;] ... relying on what we actually experience rather than on what we think.
Steve Hagen
#27. Violence isn't just a conceptual thing. it could happen to your kids.
Yoko Ono
#28. An experience, perceptual or conceptual, must conform to reality in order to be true
William James
#29. Let me end by summarizing some advantages of exemplarism. Exemplarist virtue theory has the theoretical simplicity and power of foundationalism without the problems of a conceptual foundation.
Anonymous
#30. I employ this thing I called The Shovel List."
"A shovel..?"
"No, a shovel list. It's more of a conceptual thing. It's a list of all the people and things I hate so much I want to hit them in the face with a shovel.
Marian Keyes
#31. As the conceptual, material world increases its hold on us, and inanimate objects become more lifelike, we humans must become more human. Open hearts, kindness and care-these are our most precious gifts.
Sakyong Mipham
#32. An aphorism is a mental exercise, psychical, logical, linguistic, spiritual, ritual, emotional and rational, it is a major conceptual and literary activity, a mixture of prose and poetry that conveys, in addition to ideology, sympathy or antipathy.
William C. Brown
#33. Our talk of external things, our very notion of things, is just a conceptual apparatus that helps us to foresee and control the triggerings of our sensory receptors in the light of previous triggering of our sensory receptors.
Willard Van Orman Quine
#34. Evolution is an inference from thousands of independent sources, the only conceptual structure that can make unified sense of all this disparate information.
Stephen Jay Gould
#35. I do think from time to time that conceptual questions arise: What do we mean by equilibrium? What do we mean by this concept and that concept?
Edmund Phelps
#36. As I already explaned, I don't have any form. I'm a conceptual metaphysical object.
Haruki Murakami
#37. Communion in faith, in the intimacy of meaning, cannot remain purely conceptual; it can maintain its vivifying energy only if it associates with communion in speech and action within a common space of social and cultural references. Faith needs culture.
Tariq Ramadan
#38. When you are fully present with everyone you meet, you relinquish the conceptual identity you made for them - your interpretation of who they are and what they did in the past - and are able to interact without the egoic movements of desire and fear. Attention, which is alert stillness, is the key.
Eckhart Tolle
#39. To experience anything fully and see it clearly there must be a moment of presence where conceptual thinking is not interfering with your experience of that moment.
Eckhart Tolle
#40. A healthy economics has got to have both conceptual, theoretical research and applied, empirical research.
Edmund Phelps
#41. We not only learn, but we also learn to gradually change our conceptual framework and to adapt it to what we learn.
Carlo Rovelli
#42. The homage paid to the fragment and the dismantling of the large narratives had had their spatial counterpart in the lack of integrated and conceptual vision of urban construction, and perhaps also of social construction.
Sverker Sorlin
#43. Conceptual art became the liberating idea that gave the art of the next 40 years its real impetus.
Sol LeWitt
#44. My novels aren't really generated by a single conceptual spark; it's more a process of many different elements that come together unexpectedly over a long period of time.
Donna Tartt
#45. The reality we live in is selected by our conceptual definitions. You and I may be in the same physical space, but each of us will see it as entirely different.
Ram Dass
#46. We often represent God to ourselves as being able to draw from non-being a world without sorrows, faults, dangers - a world in which there is no damage, no breakage. This is a conceptual fantasy and makes it impossible to solve the problem of evil.
Pierre Teilhard De Chardin
#47. Let us say that science fiction is a kind of conceptual disorientation of the familiar.
Adam Roberts
#48. In fact I always disliked conceptual art, because my work is about anarchistic humor.
Dan Graham
#49. I rummage around in artistic things from the past. If you don't understand the context, they wouldn't make any sense. I rummage around in conceptual ideas of the future, but if you don't know the source of the thinking, [it] wouldn't make any sense.
Billy Corgan
#50. The most important lesson I received from Conceptual art consisted in the recording of simple and obvious things, and viewing them under a whole new light.
Luigi Ghirri
#51. Given how long philosophers have been at conceptual analysis (I mean the 20th century stuff), and how many have been doing it, what can we say are the two most important concept results of all that effort?
Patricia Churchland
#52. People, and especially theologians, should try to familiarize themselves with scientific ideas. Of course, science is technical in many respects, but there are some very good books that try to set out some of the conceptual structure of science.
John Polkinghorne
#53. What would she have thought as a teenage girl arranging her artfully wasted limbs against the dais of a highly conceptual sculpture?
Jill Talbot
#54. Meditation practice is relevant because in meditation our conceptual mind relaxes and we can feel who we are at heart.
Sakyong Mipham
#55. I made the assumption, wrong of course, that conceptual analysis was a brief preliminary on the road to finding out about the nature of free will, consciousness, the self, the origin of values, and so forth.
Patricia Churchland
#56. Human labor, the manual work that people engage in to build their world, both physical and spiritual, defines the realization of their conceptual realm.
Kilroy J. Oldster
#57. Few scientists would treat their cars as badly as they treat their conceptual schemes.
Mary Midgley
#58. David is purely a conceptual artist. He didn't play any instruments or paint or anything. We were painters.
Tina Weymouth
#59. As a nation the people of this lovely island called Britain, are at the point where even one honest politician could give us a collective and conceptual nervous breakdown.
Steve Merrick
#60. After a few months in my parents' basement, I took an apartment near the state university, where I discovered both crystal methamphetamine and conceptual art. Either one of these things are dangerous, but in combination they have the potential to destroy entire civilizations.
David Sedaris
#61. Maths should be more practical and more conceptual, but less mechanical.
Conrad Wolfram
#62. I did my masters in elementary particles. But the foundations of elementary particles is quantum theory and there were too many conceptual problems around quantum theory that I couldn't live with. So I decided I was going to work on the foundations of quantum theory. That's what I did my Ph.D on.
Vandana Shiva
#63. The other great development has been in photography, but that too was influenced by Conceptual art.
Sol LeWitt
#64. Above all we have to go beyond words and images and concepts. No imaginative vision or conceptual framework is adequate to the great reality.
Bede Griffiths
#65. The precision of their goals allows conceptual artists to be satisfied that they have produced one or more works that achieve a particular purpose ... a problem solved can free him to pursue new goals.
David Galenson
#66. As with instant replay, NFL Films' use of slow motion, camera angles and the narration of Facenda was not just a technical breakthrough but a conceptual breakthrough.
Tony Verna
#67. Philosophers have actually devoted themselves, in the main, neither to perceiving the world, nor to spinning webs of conceptual theory, but to interpreting the meaning of the civilization which they have represented.
Josiah Royce
#68. We are moving from an economy and a society built on the logical, linear, computerlike capabilities of the Information Age to an economy and a society built on the inventive, empathic, big-picture capabilities of what's rising in its place, the Conceptual Age.
Daniel H. Pink
#69. I've come up through art school, through painting, through graphic design, through advertising, through TV commercials and music video. I've designed books, built billboards, matchbooks, corporate identities. I continuously paint, I've done conceptual art pictures.
Tony Kaye
#70. Cosmopolitanism has offered me an ethical perspective and a conceptual framework with which to read the signs of our times as a theologian and intellectual who has a public responsibility for constantly offering a way to engage in this rapidly changing public world.
Namsoon Kang
#71. Creatures extremely low in the intellectual scale may have conception. All that is required is that they should recognize the same experience again. A polyp would be a conceptual thinker if a feeling of 'Hello! thingumbob again!' ever flitted through its mind.
William James
#72. The programmer, like the poet, works only slightly removed from pure thought-stuff. He builds his castles in the air, from air, creating by exertion of the imagination. Few media of creation are so flexible, so easy to polish and rework, so readily capable of realizing grand conceptual structures.
Frederick P. Brooks Jr.
#73. Conceptual art is only good if the idea is good.
Sol LeWitt
#74. Implementation inheritance is a very good example for adding much conceptual complexity without giving us the full power of the ideas it builds upon.
Anonymous
#75. A meaningful conceptual basis is always more important than vivid photographs, and vice versa.
Douglas McCulloh
#76. 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
#77. Conceptual relativism is a heady and exotic doctrine, or would be if we could make good sense of it. The trouble is, as so often in philosophy, it is hard to improve intelligibility while retaining the excitement.
Donald Davidson
#78. God is the unlimited conceptual realization of the absolute wealth of potentiality.
Alfred North Whitehead
#79. My wealth of merit gathered in, With reverence but without conceptual target, When shall I reveal this truth of emptiness To those who go to ruin through belief in real existence?
Santideva
#80. I think Bitcoin is a massive conceptual and helpful step forward.
Godfrey Bloom
#81. Not only were the minds of artists formed by the university; in the same mold were formed those of the art historians, the critics, the curators, and the collectors by whom their work was evaluated. With the rise of Conceptual art, the classroom announced its final triumph over the studio.
Harold Rosenberg
#82. The pacification of all cognitive grasping and the pacification of conceptual proliferation are peace.
Nagarjuna
#83. When I was playing with synth players, I was still within a conceptual framework of playing music. When I started playing solo, I became much more aware of the acoustic phenomena that the instruments were producing.
Z'EV
#84. But the whole idea of knowledge, even, or especially, of oneself and one's own inner states, attained by direct contact and not dependent on theoretical and conceptual assumptions, is absurd.
Ernest Gellner
#85. To share the joy of that conceptual freedom with someone was a wonderful thing.
Haruki Murakami
#86. The conceptual artist Ai WeiWei illustrates the schizoid society that rapid change has produced - sometimes by reassembling Ming-style furniture into absurd and useless arrangements, or by carefully painting and antiquing a Coca-Cola logo on an ancient Chinese pot.
Arne Glimcher
#88. I tried to fit it in with some previous broad conceptual understanding of some part of mathematics that would clarify the particular problem I was thinking about.
Andrew Wiles
#89. It is not a scientific proposition to determine that some cultures lack political power because they show nothing similar to what is found in our culture. It is instead the sign of a certain conceptual poverty.
Pierre Clastres
#90. 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
#91. Terminological infelicities have a way of breeding conceptual confusion.
Donald Davidson
#92. There are very few things that are purely conceptual without any hard content.
Kevin Bacon
#93. I have a master's degree in photography as a fine art, and I would call my work primarily conceptual. I don't carry cameras with me wherever I go. I get an idea of a subject matter I want to deal with and I pull out my cameras.
Leonard Nimoy
#94. I am more convinced than ever. Conceptual integrity is central to product quality.
Fred Brooks
#95. The canvas isn't empty. It's full of whatever you imagine it to be full of. My art is so conceptual that not only do I not tell, but I don't even show. All I do is sign the canvas and try to sell it.
Jarod Kintz
#96. The liberating truth is not static; it is alive. It cannot be put into concepts and be understood by the mind. The truth lies beyond all forms of conceptual fundamentalism. What you are is the beyond - awake and present, here and now already.
Adyashanti
#97. This wisdom is not formulaic and cannot be captured in words, for it has gone beyond words to a place where direct realization rather than conceptual verbalization is the essential mode of being.
Mu Soeng
#98. This is the essence of science fiction, the conceptual dislocation within the society is generated in the author's mind, transferred to paper, and from paper it occurs as a convulsive shock in the reader's mind, the shock of dysrecognition.
Philip K. Dick
#99. So you students of the Way should immediately refrain from conceptual thought.
P'ei Hsiu
#100. I never really thought of myself as a musician. I'm not saying Sonic Youth was a conceptual-art project for me, but in a way, it was an extension of Warhol. Instead of making criticism about popular culture, as a lot of artists do, I worked within it to do something.
Kim Gordon
