Quotes About Abstract Thinking

#1. Art - when it is really doing what it should do - teaches abstract thinking; it teaches teamwork; it teaches people to actually think about things that they cannot see.

Bill T. Jones

#2. My interest in desperation lies only in that sometimes I find myself having become desperate. Very seldom do I start out that way. I can see of course that, in the abstract, thinking and all activity is rather desperate.

Willem De Kooning

#3. The combination of power, optimism and abstract thinking makes powerful people more certain. The more cut-off they are from others, the more confident they are that they are right.

Margaret Heffernan

#4. Abstract thinking leads to greater creativity ... But in our businesses and our lives, we often do the opposite. We intensify our focus rather than widen our view.

Daniel H. Pink

#5. The most dangerous thing about an academic education is that it enables my tendency to over-intellectualize stuff, to get lost in abstract thinking instead of simply paying attention to what's going on in front of me.

David Foster Wallace

#6. The unique eludes us; yet we remain faithful to the ideal of it; and in spite of sense and of our merely abstract thinking, it becomes for us the most real thing in the actual world, although for us it is the elusive goal of an infinite quest.

Josiah Royce

#7. The abstract thinking of the world is never to be expected of persons in high places ...

Walter Bagehot

#8. I think, first and foremost, Marie Antoinette was intellectually impoverished. She really had never been introduced to the notion of abstract thinking - of thinking at all in any profound way.

Kathryn Lasky

#9. The brain works in a holistic, cooperative way that makes our basest desire or most abject fear as expressive of who we are as abstract thinking of the highest order. That means that we are all equal part snakes, monkeys, and spacemen.

David Amerland

#10. Thinking - in particular abstract thinking, which most of us are introduced to through the study of mathematics and literature - helps us learn that we can become problem solvers.

Kathryn Lasky

#11. I began to realize that an intuitive understanding and consciousness was more significant than abstract thinking and intellectual logical analysis.

Walter Isaacson

#12. The theoretically interesting category-mistakes are those made by people who are perfectly competent to apply concepts, at least in the situations with which they are familiar, but are still liable in their abstract thinking to allocate those concepts to logical types to which they do not belong)

Anonymous

#13. It takes abstract thinking to see how greed can lead to prosperity, but it takes wishful thinking to claim that violence can lead to charity.

Jakub Bozydar Wisniewski

#14. People think of security as a noun, something you go buy. In reality, it's an abstract concept like happiness. Openness is unbelievably helpful to security.

James Gosling

#15. Don't preach too much to your pupils or abound in good talk in the abstract. Lie in wait rather for the practical opportunities, be prompt to seize those as they pass, and thus at one operation get your pupils both to think, to feel, and to do.

William James

#16. Concepts like millionaire and money are abstract and part of a delusional world, so you won't be able to understand the application of the knowledge if you keep thinking with the same paradigm that made you poor.

Daniel Marques

#17. I like things that reach a little further and are a little more abstract, but I don't think that's what I do naturally well. How I write naturally is probably what's furthest from me, and the most removed from what I understand.

Ryan Adams

#18. I think, basically, I'm an abstract artist. I just think that that's not even an issue. I think everything's abstract.

Julian Schnabel

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

John Bargh

#20. It's not about facts, it's about feelings. It's about remembering feelings and happiness. A definition of art is that it makes concrete our most subtle emotions. I think the highest form of art is music. It's the most abstract of all art expression.

Agnes Martin

#21. To say it another way, thinking, however abstract, originates in an embodied subjectivity, at once overdetermined and permeable to contingent events.

Teresa De Lauretis

#22. I think there are a lot of similarities between writing and music. Music is much more direct and much more emotional and that's the level I want to be at when I'm writing. Writing is much more intellectual and indirect and abstract, in a way.

Karl Ove Knausgard

#23. How much more the seeker of abstract truth, who needs periods of isolation, and rapt concentration, and almost a going out of thebody to think!

Ralph Waldo Emerson

#24. (The festival) was awfully impersonal and abstract and there was something really gloomy about it, ... That's when I first started thinking about the typical view of reality.

Thomas Cahill

#25. 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

#26. 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

#27. We think of Euclid as of fine ice; we admire Newton as we admire the peak of Teneriffe. Even the intensest labors, the most remote triumphs of the abstract intellect, seem to carry us into a region different from our own-to be in a terra incognita of pure reasoning, to cast a chill on human glory.

Walter Bagehot

#28. We often judge cities by great public buildings. But we admire great cities because people live there in a beautiful way. You have to think about how each person will live there; you can't just think about abstract ideas.

Daniel Libeskind

#29. When I see people making 'abstract' painting, I think it's just a dialogue and a dialogue isn't enough. That is to say, there is you painting and this canvas. I think there has to be a third thing; it has to be a trialogue.

Philip Guston

#30. When I was thinking about The Lion King, I said, we have to do what theater does best. What theater does best is to be abstract and not to do literal reality.

Julie Taymor

#31. To think is to ignore the differences, to generalize, to abstract.

Jorge Luis Borges

#32. Mathematical thinking is abstract, but it's also thoroughly private-sector and results-oriented.

David Foster Wallace

#33. Sometimes, some of times in life are Lifetime!

Jasleen Kaur Gumber

#34. Abstract painters: redefine your perspectives. Think in terms of the whole, not simply its parts.

Joshua L. Goldberg

#35. 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

#36. 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

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

Bob Dylan

#38. 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

#39. 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

#40. My connection with Brazil is so abstract. My blood and my way of thinking is Brazilian, but that's it. I don't tend to go back to the past, and although I have an apartment there, I rarely visit. When I move, I really move.

Paulo Coelho

#41. Music, first of all, is completely about abstraction, which is exactly what architecture is not. In a way, it has been incredibly constructive to know what true abstraction is. So you don't fall into the trap of thinking that what you do is abstract.

Rafael Vinoly

#42. Also essential to math is the sense in which abstracting something can mean reducing it to its absolute skeletal essence, as in the abstract of an article or book. As such, it can mean thinking hard about things that for the most part people can't think hard about-because it drives them crazy.

David Foster Wallace

#43. It is only those who never think at all, or else who have accustomed themselves to blood invariably on abstract ideas, that ever feel ennui.

William Hazlitt

#44. For a long while they are silent, thinking about abstract things like control and what it means to love an institution that is defined by loss, because a library is such a space and their duty is to encourage the books to leave.

Lindsey Drager

#45. 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

#46. But no one, when you stop to think, has ever equated abstract expressionism as a movement with jazz music. It's based on improvisation. The rhythms, the personal involvement, all of this is part of the jazz experience.

Romare Bearden

#47. It is so much easier to talk of poverty than to think of the poor, to argue the rights of capital than to see its results. Pretty soon we come to think of the theories and abstract ideas as things in themselves.

Walter Lippmann

#48. Cold completely introspective logic places a philosopher on the road to the abstract. Out of this empty, artificial act of thinking there can result, of course, nothing which bears on the relation of man to himself, and to the universe.

Albert Schweitzer

#49. I think everybody deserves freedom. Freedom is such an abstract word, but it's all we need.

Ai Weiwei

#50. The process of thinking itself requires us to view the universe in the direction of entropy, since an abstraction always involves information loss, since symbols 'abstract' complexity from observed objects.

John C. Wright

#51. Writing is still a bit of a miracle - the whole process: I see the world, filter the world, write down abstract squiggles on a page which somebody is then able to connect with. I'm still amazed by it and think I always will be.

Rebecca Miller

#52. It's weird that apples bruise like humans. I'm glad they don't scream when you bite into them.

Phil Lester

#53. The causal, abstract, binary, holistic, and reductionist functions of the human brain all help you to process the enormous amount of information coming into our brain from the external world every day.

Abhijit Naskar

#54. There is a rich literature on how to break out of quandary thinking. It suggests that sometimes it helps to turn from the abstract to the concrete.

Sherry Turkle

#55. As Enlightenment philosophers and scholars consciously adopted the methods of science to establish such abstract concepts as rights, liberty, and justice, successive generations have become schooled in thinking of these abstractions as applied to others in matrices-like mental rotations.

Michael Shermer

#56. Our relationship with places is a close bond, intricate in nature, and not abstract, not remote at all: It's enveloping, almost a continuum with all we are and think.

Tony Hiss

#57. It is natural to think that an abstract science cannot be of much importance in affairs of human life, because it has omitted from its consideration everything of real interest.

Alfred North Whitehead

#58. 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

#59. I was never really seeking to play music. I knew I wanted to do it, but I think I wasn't seeking it out because it seemed so abstract to me.

Kevin Morby

#60. He was like a man thinking on an abstract subject all the time.

H.W. Brands

#61. We think about the world in all ways we experience it ; we think visually, we think in sign, we think kinesthetically, we think in abstract term, we think in movement. Creativity is the process of having original ideas that have value.

Ken Robinson

#62. 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

#63. I think that if you can turn off the mind and look only with the eyes, ultimately everything becomes abstract.

Ellsworth Kelly

#64. No matter how much a young man likes to think for himself, he is always trying to model himself on some abstract pattern largely derived from the example of the world around him. And a man, no matter how conservative, shows his own worth by his personal deviation from that pattern.

Cesare Pavese

#65. I am fine, though it is hard to think of what kind of work to make at this point, other than decorative, escapist or abstract. I suppose I'll explore one or all of these things.

Cindy Sherman

#66. A philosopher of imposing stature doesn't think in a vacuum. Even his most abstract ideas are, to some extent, conditioned by what is or is not known in the time when he lives.

Alfred North Whitehead