Top 49 Figurative Quotes
#1. If you look on the history of art you observe how the most popular forms trample the rest. The abstract expressionists destroyed figurative work for more than 30 years.
Mark Edward
#2. There is a quiet humor in Yiddish and a gratitude for every day of life, every crumb of success, each encounter of love ... In a figurative way, Yiddish is the wise and humble language of us all, the idiom of a frightened and hopeful humanity.
Isaac Bashevis Singer
#3. One day, you will stand at the summit of a figurative mountain and look back on your life's journey. And, to your utter amazement, you will see how your experiences with depression, dark and painful as they were, only added to the overall beauty of your life.
Seth Adam Smith
#4. Place (or put) a spider on top of a mountain, it will only try to catch flies; alas, they are many those who, in the figurative meaning, have spider's eyes.
African Spir
#5. No matter how brilliant, amusing or intelligent the creek of abstraction, Dadaism, Minimalism and Conceptualism of the 20th century was, it didn't much affect the historical river of figuration. I predict that in 50 years and in 300 years, figurative art will still be strong and important.
Mark Kostabi
#6. Football is mesmerizing, because it's a figurative war. You go in one direction till you get there, but you get there as a team, not as an individual. Players bond whether they're black or white, much as soldiers do.
Oliver Stone
#7. What interests me is all the stuff that goes into abstract and abstract-figurative art. Not the styles, but the stuff that, in various combinations, make the styles: mixing and matching painting methods and ideas.
Ed Askew
#8. For once you're right, brother dear,' Sadie said. 'As much as I'd love to be a literal goddess, I suppose I'll have to remain a figurative one.
Rick Riordan
#9. I make figurative portraits as a way to explore theories of quantum physics.
Oliver Jeffers
#10. My mother tongue, Mende, is very expressive, very figurative, and when I write, I always struggle to find the English equivalent of things that I really want to say in Mende. For example, in Mende, you wouldn't say 'night came suddenly'; you would say 'the sky rolled over and changed its sides.'
Ishmael Beah
#11. It's the bonds forged over baijiu, more than anything else, that keep me coming back for another ganbei despite the hiccups, figurative and literal. You can learn more about someone after three shots of baijiu than in years of sober tea sipping.
Derek Sandhaus
#12. You get hit the hardest when trying to run or hide from a problem. Like the defense on a football field, putting all focus on evading only one defender is asking to be blindsided.
Criss Jami
#13. When Lynette described everything that had happened, the puzzle pieces fell into place from my last vision. Goddess, I hate figurative language.
P.C. Cast
#14. I am an abstract artist in the sense that I abstract. I cannot be called non-figurative while I am still interested in the modern magic of space, primitive sex forms, the sensual and erotic, disconcerting contours, the things of life.
Sean William Scott
#15. Yes, the mistrust of poetry has a long history, for a variety of reasons, but they all come down to sentiment and invention over fact and truth. Figurative language is suspicious.
Mary Ruefle
#16. How happy I would be if I could give figurative expression to the unconscious feeling that often murmurs so softly and sweetly within me.
Paula Modersohn-Becker
#17. You are taking things far too literally. Everything you see is merely a symbol for things you do not see. Most of the people of this world are asleep in their minds.
Seth Adam Smith
#18. Welcome to the figurative world of poetry where nothing is 'real,' but everything matters.
Laurence Overmire
#19. I am against the line and all its consequences: contours, forms, composition. All paintings of whatever sort, figurative or abstract, seem to me like prison windows in which the lines, precisely are the bars.
Yves Klein
#20. Non-figurative art is created by establishing a dynamic rhythm of determinate mutual relations which excludes the formation of any particular form.
Piet Mondrian
#21. We connect the dots in the drawing with our mind. We give them a meaning, a figurative sense, which is self-reflexive in that it creates us, because we are the experiencer of the moment.
Frederick Lenz
#22. In their figurative game of chess, Anthony Rawlings had Claire in check. Every move she made, he countered.
Aleatha Romig
#23. I'm a failed poet. Reading poetry helps me to see the world differently, and I try to infuse my prose with figurative language, which goes against the trend in fiction.
Jesmyn Ward
#24. In the eye of the law no doubt, man and wife are for many purposes one: but that is a strong figurative expression, and cannot be so dealt with as that all the consequences must follow which would result from its being literally true.
William Henry Maule
#25. A man's life of any worth is a continual allegory, and very few eyes can see the mystery of his life, a life like the scriptures, figurative.
John Keats
#26. Getting dressed for a woman is an art form, surreal, vaguely abstract, figurative and byzantine. When you undress a woman you enter her subconscious kingdom, her scents, her secrets and her fantasy.
Chloe Thurlow
#27. How strange and abandoned and unsettled I am. Like a snowdome paper weight that's been shaken. There's a blizzard in my bubble. Everything in my world that was steady and sure and sturdy has been shaken out of place, and it's now drifting and swirling back down in a confetti of debris. (p30)
Craig Silvey
#28. The air moved slowly around his body, somehow tangible, gold flaked, every dust mote a lantern.
Maggie Stiefvater
#29. I also want the figurative like a painter who only paints abstract colors but wants to show that he does so because he chooses to, not because he can't draw.
Clarice Lispector
#30. We are all hungry and thirsty for concrete images. Abstract art will have been good for one thing: to restore its exact virginity to figurative art.
Salvador Dali
#31. When religion becomes artificial, art has a duty to rescue it. Art can show that the symbols which religions would have us believe literally true are actually figurative. Art can idealize those symbols, and so reveal the profound truths they contain.
Richard Wagner
#32. The neighborhood is nothing but a protective zone- remodeling, disinfection, a snobbish and hygenic design- but above all in a figurative sense: it is a machine for making emptiness.
Jean Baudrillard
#33. With Gnaw I was thinking about traditional sculpture, about carving. I was also interested in figurative sculpture. I put those two ideas together and decided that rather than describing the body, I would use the body, my body, as a tool for making art.
Janine Antoni
#34. [Y]ou were too alert to the figurative possibilities of words not to see the phrase [angle of repose] as descriptive of human as well as detrital rest. As you said, it was too good for mere dirt; you tried to apply it to your own wandering and uneasy life ... I wonder if you ever reached it.
Wallace Stegner
#35. I slept all day, face down in the pillow, a comfortable dead-man's float only remotely disturbed by a chill undertow of reality - talk, footsteps, slamming doors - which threaded fitfully through the dark, blood-warm waters of dream.
Donna Tartt
#36. For Rat Kiley, I think, facts were formed by sensation, not the other way around, and when you listened to one of his stories, you'd find yourself performing rapid calculations in your head, subtracting superlatives, figuring the square root of an absolute and then multiplying by maybe.
Tim O'Brien
#37. It was a needless precaution, I felt sure, but men always enjoy marching around with weapons and flexing their figurative muscles, and I saw no reason to deny them this harmless exercise.
Elizabeth Peters
#38. What a funny thing painting is. The abstract painters always insist on their connection with the visible reality, while the so called figurative artists insist that what they really care about, is the abstract qualities of life.
Marlene Dumas
#39. And by Bunsen burner I meant, literally, my Bunsen burner. Not the figurative Bunsen burner in my pants.
Penny Reid
#40. I like bringing poetry's focus on figurative language and compression into the essay. Of course, the musical properties of language, the cadence of the sentence, are really important to me in prose.
Alison Hawthorne Deming
#41. For me, intuitive thinking means associative thinking; intuition causes us to introduce narrative or figurative elements into a poem before we're able to explain why those elements belong.
James Arthur
#42. A trite popular saying, or proverb. (Figurative and colloquial.) So called because it makes its way into a wooden head. Following are examples of old saws fitted with new teeth.
Ambrose Bierce
#43. The modern version of Buridan's ass [a figurative description of a man of indecision] has a Ph.D., but no time to grow up as he is undecided between making a Leonardo da Vinci in the test tube or planting a Coca Cola sign on Mars.
Erwin Chargaff
#44. I often told the fanatics of realism that there is no such thing as realism in art: it only exists in the mind of the observer. Art is a symbol, a thing conjuring up reality in our mental image. That is why I don't see any contradiction between abstract and figurative art either.
Antoni Tapies
#45. Do not pollute my perfectly acceptable figurative speech with irrelevant facts!
Courtney Milan
#46. All that tends not to charity is figurative. The sole aim of the Scripture is charity.
Blaise Pascal
#47. Virgil, above all poets, had a stock which I may call almost inexhaustible, of figurative, elegant, and sounding words.
John Dryden
#48. Guess in my brain I have a figurative 'man card' that's got certain punches that need to be punched.
Jason Babin
#49. Best friends are literal and figurative life savers that we should thank as often as possible for rescuing us from ourselves.
Joshunda Sanders
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