Top 100 Quotes About Abstraction
#1. Sometimes, we use the term 'growth' as a number and sometimes as an abstraction, but the underlying implication is always that, if the country grows at a certain rate, at the end there will be a pot of gold for everyone.
Jamshyd Godrej
#2. I understood what he was doing, that he had spent four years fulfilling the absurd and tedious duty of graduating from college and now he was emancipated from that world of abstraction, false security, parents, and material excess.
Jon Krakauer
#3. For the fiction writer himself the whole story is the meaning, because it is an experience, not an abstraction.
Flannery O'Connor
#4. Age, like wealth is but a mental abstraction, my boy"~ Herr Doktor Pavel
K.W. Jeter
#6. As a movement Cubism had consistently stopped short of complete abstraction. Heretics such as Delaunay had painted pure abstractions but in so doing had deserted Cubism.
Alfred H. Barr Jr.
#7. All art is an abstraction to some degree.
Henry Moore
#8. A hint - don't paint too much direct from nature. Art is an abstraction! study nature then brood on it and treasure the creation which will result, which is the only way to ascend towards God - to create like our Divine Master.
Paul Gauguin
#9. Abstraction is a mental process we use when trying to discern what is essential or relevant to a problem; it does not require a belief in abstract entities.
Tom G. Palmer
#10. Why must art be static? You look at an abstraction, sculptured or painted, an entirely exciting arrangement of planes, spheres, nuclei, entirely without meaning. It would be perfect, but it is always still. The next step in sculpture is motion.
Alexander Calder
#11. I still believe in abstraction, but now I know that one ends with abstraction, not starts with it
Alexander Stepanov
#12. Ideas are not just counters used by the calculating mind; they are also golden vessels full of living feeling. "Freedom" is not a mere abstraction, it is also an emotion. ~Carl Jung, The Symbolic Life, Pages 310-311.
C. G. Jung
#13. Do not copy nature. Art is an abstraction. Rather, bring your art forth by dreaming in front of her and think more of creation.
Paul Gauguin
#14. 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
#15. Whether a photo or music, or a drawing or anything else I might do - it's ultimately all an abstraction of my peculiar experience.
William Eggleston
#16. Competition and rivalry between the members of a group are the antithesis of the cooperation and team play needed in an effective management group. This is why team building is an empty abstraction for a group whose leader controls with power.
Thomas Gordon
#17. I felt like my parents were always involved with abstraction, and I wanted to do something very specific.
Lena Dunham
#18. I began as a naturalistic painter. Very quickly I felt the urgent need for a more concise form of expression and an economy of means. I never stopped progressing toward abstraction.
Piet Mondrian
#19. It is terrible to destroy a person's picture of himself in the interests of truth or some other abstraction.
Doris Lessing
#20. The story of evolution unfolds with increasing levels of abstraction.
Ray Kurzweil
#21. The psychological profiling [of a programmer] is mostly the ability to shift levels of abstraction, from low level to high level. To see something in the small and to see something in the large.
Donald Knuth
#22. In the 'Nude Descending a Staircase,' I wanted to create a static image of movement: movement is an abstraction, a deduction articulated within the painting, without our knowing if a real person is or isn't descending an equally real staircase.
Marcel Duchamp
#23. The effective exploitation of his powers of abstraction must be regarded as one of the most vital activities of a competent programmer.
Edsger Dijkstra
#24. I do believe abstraction is and was meant to embody deep emotion. I believe that's its job, in the history of art.
Sean Scully
#25. I'm really interested in the nondefinitive element of abstraction.
Julie Mehretu
#26. Let us thank God for valour in abstraction
For those who go their own way, will not kiss
The arse of law and order nor compound
For physical comfort at the price of pride
Louis MacNeice
#27. The increased abstraction in mathematics that took place during the early part of this century was paralleled by a similar trend in the arts. In both cases, the increased level of abstraction demands greater effort on the part of anyone who wants to understand the work.
Keith Devlin
#29. Too often in Washington we tend to see foreign policy as an abstraction, with little understanding of what we are committing our country to: the complications and consequences of endeavors.
Chuck Hagel
#30. My work has the abstraction underneath it all now & what I deliberately set out to do down here, for this is the perfect realistic abstraction in landscape.
Marsden Hartley
#31. The pragmatist turns away from abstraction and insufficiency, from verbal solutions, from bad a priori reasons, from fixed principles, closed systems, and pretended absolutes and origins. He turns toward concreteness and adequacy, towards facts, towards action, and towards power.
William James
#32. I've always wondered, like, what is so masculine about abstraction? How did men get the ownership over this?
Cecily Brown
#33. The Geometer has the special privilege to carry out, by abstraction, all constructions by means of the intellect. Who, then, would wish to prevent me from freely considering figures hanging on a balance imagined to be at an infinite distance beyond the confines of the world?
Evangelista Torricelli
#34. A revolution was never fought, throughout history, for ideals. Revolutions were fought for much more concrete things: food, clothes, housing, and to relieve intolerable oppression. ... I know of no one, outside of Patrick Henry, willing to die for an abstraction.
William Powell
#35. I have always loved contemporary dance, but it has always been a bit of a mystery to me. But choreography is very much like what I do when you are putting characters in frame on the page. It's so impressive what they do with their bodies. It's like painting: an abstraction.
Michael Leunig
#36. When a man knows that the abstraction ten exists - nothing on earth can stop him from looking for the fact of eleven.
Lorraine Hansberry
#37. Home is where the heart is, we say, rubbing the flint of one abstraction against another.
Diane Ackerman
#38. She began to learn that nothing is dead, that there cannot be a physical abstraction, that nothing exists for the sake of the laws of its phenomena.
George MacDonald
#39. This new plastic idea will ignore the particulars of appearance, that is to say, natural form and colour. On the contrary, it should find its expression in the abstraction of form and colour, that is to say, in the straight line and the clearly defined primary colour.
Piet Mondrian
#40. Absolute honesty is as absurd an abstraction as an absolute temperature or an absolute value.
George Bernard Shaw
#41. Pay attention to minute particulars. Take care of the little ones. Generalization and abstraction are the plea of the hypocrite, scoundrel, and knave.
William Blake
#42. Nothing, indeed, is more dangerous to the young artist than any conception of ideal beauty: he is constantly led by it either into weak prettiness or lifeless abstraction: whereas to touch the ideal at all, you must not strip it of vitality.
Oscar Wilde
#43. The abstraction is often the most definite form for the intangible thing in myself that I can clarify in paint.
Georgia O'Keeffe
#45. Pure drawing is an abstraction. Drawing and colour are not distinct, everything in nature is coloured.
Paul Cezanne
#46. Mathematics is the art of giving the same name to different things.
Henri Poincare
#47. It is not that uncommon for the cost of an abstraction to outweigh the benefit it delivers. Kill one today!
John Carmack
#48. Reflection is only a partial understanding of truth if it does not translate itself in practice into commitments to the common good and justice. Truth is not mere abstraction but something to be done and is only apprehended when this is realized.
Adolfo Perez Esquivel
#49. For me with art and all that stuff - I like abstraction. I like contortion. I mean, it's still truth. But it's truth through the center of the individual. It doesn't necessarily mean that it's fallacies or falsehoods. It just happens to be one perception of what's happening.
Q-Tip
#50. My book might be seen as a search for lower consciousness, an attempt to remove the patina of abstraction or glassy-eyed piety from religious words, by telling stories about them, by grounding them in the world we live in as mortal and often comically fallible human beings.
Kathleen Norris
#51. I would put myself in the attitude to look in the eye an abstract truth, and I cannot. I blench and withdraw on this side and on that. I seem to know what he meant who said, No man can see God face to face and live.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#52. In order than everything should be reduced to the same level, it is first of all necessary to procure a phantom, its spirit, a monstrous abstraction, an all-embracing something which is nothing, a mirage
and that phantom is the public.
Soren Kierkegaard
#53. Imagination, abstraction, creativity, and coherence etc are some inherently cognitive and mental elements of architect-wise thinking.
Pearl Zhu
#54. All that is alive tends toward color, individuality, specificity, effectiveness and opacity. All that is done with life inclines toward knowledge, abstraction, generality transfiguration and transparency.
Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
#55. 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
#56. Banality depends on memory, as do irony and abstraction and boredom, three other defenses the educated mind deploys against experience so that it can get through the day without being continually, exhaustingly astonished.
Michael Pollan
#57. In my state of spiritual abstraction, I no longer belong to myself and to my eyesight. I am nothing more than a single narrow gasping lung, floating over the mists and summits.
Reinhold Messner
#58. Our intelligence cannot wall itself up alive, like a pupa in a chrysalis. It must at any cost keep on speaking terms with the universe that engendered it.
William James
#59. We do not wish to imitate nature, we do not wish to reproduce. We want to produce. We want to produce the way a plant produces its fruit, not depict. We want to produce directly, not indirectly. Since there is not a trace of abstraction in this art we call it concrete art.
Hans Arp
#61. It does not at first appear that an astronomer rapt in abstraction, while he gazes on a star, must feel more exquisite delight than a farmer who is conducting his team.
Isaac D'Israeli
#62. Ingres was one of those artists to whom the outline was something sacred and magical, and the reason is that it was the means of reconciling the major conflict in his art, the conflict between abstraction and sensibility.
Kenneth Clark
#63. By object is meant some element in the complex whole that is defined in abstraction from the whole of which it is a distinction.
John Dewey
#65. I work in colour sometimes, but I guess the images I most connect to, historically speaking, are in black and white. I see more in black and white - I like the abstraction of it.
Mary Ellen Mark
#66. 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
#67. To arrive at abstraction, it is always necessary to begin with a concrete reality.
Pablo Picasso
#69. No doubt, in complete abstraction one has a feeling of a great shock, if not an explosion, and in approaching the real, one feels health and truth restored ...
Jean Helion
#70. So what we can say is that freedom is the experience of abnormality as possibility, uttered in abstraction and compelled by strange-love that no law can underwrite.
Anonymous
#71. Time isn't made of anything. It is an abstraction. Just a meaning that we impose upon motion.
Anne Carson
#72. Chimps can do all sorts of things we thought that only we could do - like tool-making and abstraction and generalisation. They can learn a language - sign language - and they can use the signs. But when you think of our intellects, even the brightest chimp looks like a very small child.
Jane Goodall
#73. All suffering is suffering. As C. S. Lewis said, there is no such thing as "the sum of the world's suffering," an abstraction of the philosophers. There are simply individual people who hurt. And who wonder why God permits it.
Philip Yancey
#74. Writing is the hammer & chisel that breaks down the established way of thinking. A concrete event, then an abstraction. An image, then a thought. Finally, writing builds another establishment with the fragments.
Diane Glancy
#75. Honesty was a thing that could never be a thing. In a blaze of hubris and misplaced enthusiasm, we kowtowed to it, thinking it would make us better people, but conveniently forgetting that an abstraction was incompatible with the specificity of a human's needs and wants.
Erin Bomboy
#76. Painter after painter, since the beginning of the century, has tended toward abstraction. First, the Impressionists simplified the landscape in terms of color, and then the Fauves simplified it again by adding distortion, which, for some reason, is a characteristic of our century.
Marcel Duchamp
#77. Abstraction, n.
Love is one kind of abstraction. And then there are those nights when I sleep alone, when I curl into a pillow that isn't you, when I hear the tiptoe sounds that aren't yours. It's not as if I can conjure you up completely. I must embrace the idea of you instead.
David Levithan
#78. She really was pretty, for a grown-up, but when you are seven, beauty is an abstraction, not an imperative.
Neil Gaiman
#79. Happiness needs unhappiness. Joy goes hand in hand with sorrow. It is thanks to the shadow that we exist. We must not dream of an absurd abstraction. We must guard the bond that links us to blood and earth.
Henri Barbusse
#80. Both [social science & science fiction] attempt to understand empirical facts and lived experience as something that is shaped by abstract - and not directly perceptible - structural forces.
Peter Frase
#81. I'm an abstract painter not just for myself, but because I really believe in abstraction.
Brice Marden
#82. Everything will be all right - you know when? When people, just people, stop thinking of the United Nations as a weird Picasso abstraction and see it as a drawing they made themselves.
Dag Hammarskjold
#83. A QUESTION OF VISION. From the sun's seat, after all, humanity is an abstraction.
Lauren Groff
#84. It always seems as though the definition of love will remain debatable by an opinionated world.
Criss Jami
#85. The key to using abstraction effectively in programming is finding a notion of relevance that is appropriate for both the builder of an abstraction and the potential clients of the abstraction. That is the true art of programming.
John V. Guttag
#86. Everything abstract is ultimately part of the concrete. Everything inanimate finally serves the living. That is why every activity dealing in abstraction stands in ultimate service to a living whole.
Edith Stein
#87. Freedom which has genuine meaning is more than a timeless abstraction, more than an absence of restraints.
Helen Lynd
#88. We Humanists behave as well as we can, without any expectation of rewards or punishments in an Afterlife. We serve as best we can the only abstraction with which we have any real familiarity, which is our community.
Kurt Vonnegut
#89. The Why's of suffering keep us shrouded in a seemingly bottomless void of abstraction where God is reduced to a finite ethical agent, a limited psychological personality, whose purposes measure on the same scale as ours.
Tullian Tchividjian
#90. Seek art and abstraction in nature by dreaming in the presence of it.
Paul Gauguin
#91. True leaders have so much power they are willing to give it away. Power is not a fixed, quantifiable sum; instead it is an unlimited abstraction which grows as it is shared.
Marlene Caroselli
#92. I have this certain vision of the way I want my comics to look; this sort of photographic realism, but with a certain abstraction that comics can give. It's kind of a fine line.
Daniel Clowes
#93. Everywhere you turned, everything was happening, and everything that was happening took you away from all abstraction and into something human, where answers weren't so easy.
Pico Iyer
#94. Whether dark presages of the night proceed from any latent power of the soul during her abstraction, or from any operation of subordinate spirits, has been a dispute.
Joseph Addison
#95. Mystic equality lies in abstraction, not in having or in doing, which are processes. In function and process, one man, one part, must of necessity be subordinate to another. It is a condition of being.
D.H. Lawrence
#96. Two elements are needed to form a truth - a fact and an abstraction.
Remy De Gourmont
#97. The pendulum of mathematics swings back and forth towards abstraction and away from it with a timing that remains to be estimated.
Gian-Carlo Rota
#98. The ills attributed to an anthropomorphic abstraction called "society" may be laid more realistically at the door of Everyman. Utopia must spring in the private bosom before it can flower into civic virtue, inner reforms leading to outer ones. A man who has reformed himself will reform thousands.
Paramahansa Yogananda
#99. Thou shalt make no image, no abstraction, including none of THE American, THE Swiss, THE German.
Karl Barth
#100. Jesus never spoke of truth in abstraction, as something that stands alone. Jesus always spoke of truth in relation to God being revealed through himself.
Tim McConnell
