Quotes About Abstract

#1. I like using concrete imagery, but I don't feel that's what it's about. It's a combination of concrete and abstract to take the listener somewhere they know better than you. That's true for music, seeing a painting, watching a movie ... it's all some kind of an escape.

M. Ward

#2. 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

#3. Humans are in delusion by default, and those who conquer their delusion can understand good and evil. Morality is an arbitrary abstract, it is not good or evil and those who provoke morality a righteous act, are still at the sideways of delusion and conquer.

M.F. Moonzajer

#4. Know what your sin is and confess it; but do not imagine that you have approved yourself a penitent by confessing sin in the abstract.

Theodore L. Cuyler

#5. Abstract art is a creative interplay between the conscious and the unconscious, with the conscious mind making all the final decisions and in control throughout.

Lawren Harris

#6. The most important lesson to take away from allowing the minimum wage and unemployment benefit data to talk is that abstract notions of what is right, good and just should be examined from a concrete, operational point of view. A dose of reality is most edifying.

Steve Hanke

#7. We scorn the abstract; we scorn it with passion.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

#8. In St. Petersburg, the most abstract and intentional city on the entire globe. (Cities and be intentional or unintentional.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky

#9. The creators of the Constitution were not purple-robed scholars, sitting in their ivory towers attempting to put abstract theories into play, but men who had come to realize that their system of government was broken. These men desired desperately to repair it.

C.L. Gammon

#10. Even the most seemingly abstract, sublimely theoretical, mathematicized achievements of science have in reality moved only a step or two away from a prehistoric, coarsely sensory-based, anthropomorphic understanding of the world around us.

Stanislaw Lem

#11. A lot of my work is about what's abstract and what's pictorial. Is it bubblegum, or is it an abstract painting using bubblegum? The energy comes from walking that line and watching things dip this way and that.

Dan Colen

#12. If you seek just a little truth, as most, you should not ignore abstract forms, the basis from which all short-lived experiences we call reality springs.

Eugene J. Martin

#13. I mean, I find things that happened in real life to be the funniest - things that you observe instead of crazy abstract things, you know.

Jonah Hill

#14. I always choose strong, direct backlighting that creates patterns of intricate abstract shadows. These shadows become strong design elements that lie across and touch other objects in the set up.

William C. Wright

#15. For me, the canvas is an abstract interpretation of a wall. It's a piece of art with its own history, one that alludes to the passage of time and to the theater of life.

Jose Parla

#16. Theology isn't what drove them to their ... theology. author writes on dealing with the embittering experience of those who protect a wounded place with abstract arguments.

Andy Stanley

#17. On the surface, there was always an impeccably realistic world, but underneath, behind the backdrop's cracked canvas, lurked something different, something mysterious or abstract.

Milan Kundera

#18. I want people to know what it is they're looking at. But at the same time, the closer they get to the painting, it's like going back into childhood. And it's like an abstract piece.. it becomes the landscape of the brush marks rather than just sort of an intellectual landscape.

Jenny Saville

#19. I felt the most intense pleasure in piercing the stone in order to make an abstract form and space; quite a different sensation from that of doing it for the purpose of realism.

Barbara Hepworth

#20. Children in the abstract, had never appealed to me. They seemed to be loud creatures, often dripping some form of goo.

Stephenie Meyer

#21. I wear my pants on my upper torso to be abstract and different.

Thom Yorke

#22. Each department of knowledge passes through three stages. The theoretic stage; the theological stage and the metaphysical or abstract stage.

Auguste Comte

#23. I wish to approach truth as closely as is possible, and therefore I abstract everything until I arrive at the fundamental quality of objects.

Piet Mondrian

#24. Although a lot of my work on the mind has been rather abstract and philosophical, I'm interested in psychology and neuroscience and I don't think there are any principled distinctions between the kind of knowledge we get from science and the knowledge we get from philosophy.

Tim Crane

#25. To really be on stage and not know what you're going to say, and to be able to say something that makes people laugh, or do something that's sort of abstract or off the beaten path and have people connect to it by just putting your ideas together, that really makes me happy.

Mary Lynn Rajskub

#26. It makes no difference whether a work is naturalistic or abstract; every visual expression follows the same fundamental laws.

Hans Hofmann

#27. People understand what art is supposed to look like, and so it's easy to make something that looks like art but isn't - especially in an abstract form.

Lucien Smith

#28. One of the main ways we move from abstract knowledge about God to a personal encounter with him as a living reality is through the furnace of affliction.

Timothy Keller

#29. The abstract has no emotional content ... the abstract is more powerful the more abstract it is.

Cecil Balmond

#30. This was mere unfounded prejudice
that seems obvious to me
because neither before nor after existed, nor any place to immigrate from, but there were those who insisted that the concept of "immigrant" could be understood in the abstract, outside of space and time.

Italo Calvino

#31. The abstract, unreal freedom of the liberal intellect was really nothing more than childish disobedience, amplified into anarchy.

Roger Scruton

#32. Photography is light-writing, the language of images. Less abstract than written or spoken language, it selects images from the existing world of appearances and arranges them in patterns. The camera-eye doesn't think, it recognizes. It shows us what we already know, but don't know that we know.

David Levi Strauss

#33. I'm not satisfied sitting in just the world of abstract work.

Twyla Tharp

#34. 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

#35. Abstract painting is dead. That's why it has become so interesting again.

Chris Martin

#36. They are imbeciles who call my work abstract. That which they call abstract is the most realistic, because what is real is not the exterior but the idea, the essence of things.

Constantin Brancusi

#37. There seems to be a firewall in my mind against ideas expressed in numbers and graphs rather than words, or in abstract words such as Sin or Creativity. I just don't understand. And incomprehension is boredom.

Ursula K. Le Guin

#38. Beauty is a type of art everyone is trying to perfect, but no one realizes it's abstract art.

Keaton Stromberg

#39. Learning is stronger when it matters, when the abstract is made concrete and personal.

Peter C. Brown

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

Carl Andre

#41. There was nothing abstract or theoretical in his world. The stars had no significance. The sky was not interesting unless it showed probability of rain. He ate corn, corn, corn. He ate beans, beans, beans.

Warren Eyster

#42. [I]n every theology or system, every tradition or discursive practice, a story is being told whose peculiar force should be allowed priority over the abstract categories by which the critic might seek to reduce all narrative to the same bare framework of elementary functions.

David Bentley Hart

#43. 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

#44. The longer you look at an object, the more abstract it becomes, and, ironically, the more real.

Lucian Freud

#45. Abstract conversations are my favourite, for they unviel true convictions.

Parul Wadhwa

#46. We claim we believe in compassion, which is an abstract, and when it's personified we discredit the man

Mort Sahl

#47. I paint like an abstract painter everything is inside nothing is meant to be, I take tattoos off a people I take anything that's not necessarily going to be timeless. I want to get across what I feel and I just use the figure because I enjoy the figure.

Jason Shawn Alexander

#48. Abstract art is only painting. And what's so dramatic about that? There is no abstract art. One must always begin with something. Afterwards one can remove all semblance of reality; there is no longer any danger as the idea of the object has left an indelible imprint.

Pablo Picasso

#49. If things are better for women there, it is due to a profound and enduring social consensus that life should be made livable based on who they are and not on an abstract moralistic notion of how they ought to be.

Judith Warner

#50. I've always had an artistic hand. I took on paint when I started falling in love with the abstract expressionists. I approached it from a physical standpoint, but I've also been honing my compositional eye through film.

Billy Zane

#51. 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

#52. My guard stood hard when abstract threats, too noble to neglect, deceived me into thinking, I had something to protect.

Bob Dylan

#53. To think is to forget a difference, to generalize, to abstract.

Guy Deutscher

#54. I admire the abstract expressionists and pop artists so right now I'm referencing American '60s art and at the same time referencing Japanese manga culture.

Christian Marclay

#55. I'm not into politics but I am committed to a cause: ensuring design technology and engineering stays on the U.K. curriculum, alongside science and maths - grounding abstract theory, merging the practical with the academic.

James Dyson

#56. But nobody is visually naive any longer. We are cluttered with images, and only abstract art can bring us to the threshold of the divine.

Dominique De Menil

#57. There is very little moral mixture in the 'Antislavery' feeling of this country. A great deal is abstract philanthropy; part is hatred of slaveholders; a great part is jealousy for white labor, very little is consciousness of wrong done and the wish to right it.

George William Curtis

#58. The abstraction, ostensibly, is simply for me the penetration of something that is more profound in many ways than rigidity of a form. A form if it breathes some, if it has some enigma to it, it is also the enigma that is the abstract, I would think.

Beauford Delaney

#59. Artists with a capital 'A' are at ease working in all areas of art, whether it is a contemporary abstract painting or work requiring methods and techniques of the Renaissance Masters.

Igor Babailov

#60. Within two hours of where I live, you have mountains and desert as location. I like the natural elements that abstract into light, texture, shape and shadow.

Herb Ritts

#61. Once out of your cradle, you don't focus on the world in the abstract, perceiving things for the first time, but in synchrony with your accumulated knowledge, which enriches and helps define your experience, as well as ensuring its uniqueness.

Winifred Gallagher

#62. The thinking of the one, therefore, will be determined by eternal truth, the actions of the other more by the practical reality of the moment. The greatness of the one lies in the absolute abstract soundness of his idea ...

Adolf Hitler

#63. Representational painters: loosen the grip of inflexibility! Abstract painters: tighten your hold on crafting your images! In both types of painting students need to unlearn what one has acquired.

Joshua L. Goldberg

#64. I hate women, hate them generally, not in particular but in an abstract way. I hate them because one never really learns anything about them. They are inscrutable.

Orson Welles

#65. gold is valuable as a currency or investment because we believe it is valuable (which is the same reason for valuing money itself). Gold's value as currency is an abstract social construct.

Paul Vigna

#66. As the therapeutic relationship is established and progress occurs in problem areas, the therapist can "lead" and "push" the adolescent toward abstract reasoning skill.

Virgil Miller Newton

#67. Writing is an abstract art of drawing pictures of the conscious and subconscious mind with words.

Debasish Mridha

#68. Challenge quandary thinking, either/or thinking come by moving from the abstract to the concrete. What can we do with the choice actually in front of us?

Sherry Turkle

#69. I like the fact that music is more abstract.

Bryan Ferry

#70. Algebraic geometry seems to have acquired the reputation of being esoteric, exclusive, and very abstract, with adherents who are secretly plotting to take over all the rest of mathematics. In one respect this last point is accurate.

David Mumford

#71. 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

#72. A culture is not an abstract thing. It is a living, evolving process. The aim is to push beyond standard-setting and asserting human rights to make those standards a living reality for people everywhere.

Mary Robinson

#73. Height, width, and depth are the three phenomena which I must transfer into one plane to form the abstract surface of the picture, and thus to protect myself from the infinity of space.

Max Beckmann

#74. For myself, I favored the abstract. I collected not just obsolete terms and words, but ideas.

Jasper Fforde

#75. A tendency toward the abstract is inherent in linear expression: graphic imagery being confined to outlines has a fairy-like quality and at the same time can achieve great precision.

Paul Klee

#76. Everyone who makes films has to be an athlete to a certain degree because cinema does not come from abstract academic thinking; it comes from your knees and thighs.

Werner Herzog

#77. Change means movement. Movement means friction. Only in the frictionless vacuum of a nonexistent abstract world can movement or change occur without that abrasive friction of conflict.

Saul Alinsky

#78. I am a woman first of all. At the core of my work was a journal written for the father I lost, loved and wanted to keep. I am personal. I am essentially human, not intellectual. I do not understand abstract act. Only art born of love, passion, pain.

Anais Nin

#79. My own physicality, not an abstract idea, makes me a choreographer.

Twyla Tharp

#80. The place that the shepherds found was not an academy or an abstract republic, it was not a place of myths allegorised or dissected or explained or explained away. It was a place of dreams come true.

G.K. Chesterton

#81. Art bids us touch and taste and hear and see the world, and shrinks from what Blake calls mathematic form, from every abstract form, from all that is of the brain only.

William Butler Yeats

#82. Abstract painting is abstract. It confronts you. There was a reviewer a while back who wrote that my pictures didn't have any beginning or any end. He didn't mean it as a compliment, but it was.

Jackson Pollock

#83. I used to like the foods that come in abstract shapes: chicken nuggets, Fruit Roll-Ups, hot dogs.

Ned Vizzini

#84. And in this passion for understanding her soul lay close to his; she had him all to herself. But he must be made abstract first.

D.H. Lawrence

#85. When money gets too far away from actual, physical, real equity and property it gets too abstract and too distantly derived and then suddenly it's not worth anything anymore. And the same is true of language.

Roy Blount Jr.

#86. Realism' has been abandoned in the search for reality: the 'principal objective' of abstract art is precisely this reality.

Ben Nicholson

#87. 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

#88. Do you not see, first, that - as a mental abstract - physical force is directly opposed to morality; and secondly, that it practically drives out of existence the moral forces?

Auberon Herbert

#89. How many people make themselves abstract to appear profound. The most useful part of abstract terms are the shadows they create to hide a vacuum.

Joseph Joubert

#90. A "fraternity" is the antithesis of fraternity. The first ... is predicated on the idea of exclusion; the second (that is, the abstract thing) is based on a feeling of total equality.

E.B. White

#91. Abstract ideas are the patterns two or more memories have in common.

Rudolf Flesch

#92. Abstract knowledge is not enough. At the end of the day, it's about how one reacts to circumstances in an extreme real-time situation.

Boaz Lavie

#93. Because of his capacity for abstract communications and language and his ability to enter in imagination into the lives of others, man is able to build organizations of a size and complexity far beyond those of the lower animals.

Kenneth E. Boulding

#94. [Photography] puts a human face on issues which, from afar, can appear abstract or ideological or monumental in their global impact.

James Nachtwey

#95. There is certainly a part of my filmmaking that harkens to a more simpler commercial kind of taste, but then with this there's certainly a kind of avant-garde, abstract, existential element to it.

J. C. Chandor

#96. In a strict sense photography can never be abstract, for the camera is incapable of synthetic integration.

Ansel Adams

#97. Her elegance was in the abstract; in her gait, in her posture, even in how she breathed.

Heru Ptah

#98. I like working with sound; sound and rhythm. I like the abstract more than "What does that mean?" Nobody ever says to you, "Why did you use a harmonium?" Or "What is that ringing sound that occurs here?" The questions are always "What does that song mean?" or "What were you trying to say here?"

Paul Simon

#99. Honest talk about the deficit is risky. Voters are more enthusiastic about the abstract notion of deficit reduction than about the painful details of accomplishing it.

Christina Romer

#100. If anything, his parables guarantee the failure not only of his characters, but of readers wishing to abstract any lessons applicable to their own lives. Failure, it seems, is Kafka's true subject.

Franz Kafka