Top 100 Quotes About The Abstract
#1. Linear's defeated form
The intangible reality rise.' ~ Wanderer
Stella Coulson
#2. Painting is ... a richer language than words ... Painting operates through signs which are not abstract and incorporeal like words. The signs of painting are much closer to the objects themselves.
Jean Dubuffet
#3. There is something very pleasing about the principles of science and the rules of math, because they are so inevitable and so harmonious - in the abstract, anyway.
Lydia Davis
#4. Nature and abstract forms are both materials for art, and the choice of one or the other flows from historically changing interests.
Meyer Schapiro
#5. Jerking off the universe is perhaps what all philosophy, all abstract thought is about: an intense, and not very sociable pleasure, which has to be repeated again and again.
Susan Sontag
#6. Knowledge was the great thing
not abstract knowledge in which Dr. Forester had been so rich, the theories which lead one enticingly on with their appearance of nobility, of transcendent virtue, but detailed, passionate, trivial human knowledge.
Graham Greene
#7. Color is for me the purest form of expression, the purest abstract reality.
Jim Hodges
#8. Music is at once the most wonderful, the most alive of all the arts- it is the most abstract, the most perfect, the most pure- and the most sensual. I listen with my body and it is my body that aches in response to the passion and pathos embodied in this music.
Susan Sontag
#9. I thought, enough of this, I'm not an abstract painter, what the hell am I going to do? Should I get a job in a shoe store, sell real estate, or what? I was really depressed by the whole thing, because I felt like a painter, yet I couldn't make paintings.
Ralph Goings
#10. But man has such a predilection for systems and abstract deductions that he is ready to distort the truth intentionally, he is ready to deny the evidence of his senses only to justify his logic.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
#11. Freedom is not merely a word or an abstract theory, but the most effective instrument for advancing the welfare of man.
John F. Kennedy
#12. To [the government] it didn't matter what happened to the American people as long as america in the abstract was kept strong.
Isaac Asimov
#13. He [Professor Moriarty] is the Napoleon of crime, Watson. He is the organizer of half that is evil and of nearly all that is undetected in this great city. He is a genius, a philosopher, an abstract thinker. He has a brain of the first order.
Arthur Conan Doyle
#14. Whoever thought the immediate alternates with the immediate action is not an abstract painter.
Pierre Alechinsky
#15. Telescopes and bathyscapes and sonar probes of Scottish lakes, Tacoma Narrows bridge collapse explained with abstract phase-space maps, some x-ray slides, a music score, Minard's Napoleonic war: the most exciting new frontier is charting what's already here.
Randall Munroe
#16. It seems to me, that the only Objects of the abstract Sciences or of Demonstration is Quantity and Number, and that all Attempts to extend this more perfect Species of Knowledge beyond these Bounds are mere Sophistry and Illusion.
David Hume
#17. People weep at music all the time, because music gives form to some abstract level of integration.
Joe Bradley
#18. Let me first say that I don't think the millennium target of cutting global poverty in half is an impossible or abstract target. I think it is a real and achievable goal.
Gro Harlem Brundtland
#19. From the point of view of art, there are no concrete or abstract forms, but only forms which are more or less convincing lies.
Pablo Picasso
#20. I think more than writers, the major influences on me have been European movies, jazz, and Abstract Expressionism.
Don DeLillo
#21. 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
#22. I would admit that poetry is something more than mere communication and that if that 'something more' could be abstracted from the whole, it might well prove to be that which makes the whole a poem.
Louis MacNeice
#23. What they didn't want to believe, what they tried repeatedly to dismiss, was that whatever good and evil existed in the world came from within themselves and not from some abstract source.
Terry Brooks
#24. There is only one ' principle that can preserve a free society: namely, the strict prevention of all coercion except in the enforcement of general abstract rules equally applicable to all.
Friedrich August Von Hayek
#25. This
is the abstract, this
is the cold doing, this
is the almost impossible
Charles Olson
#26. 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
#27. Abstract Expressionism - the first American movement to have a worldwide influence - was remarkably short-lived: It heated up after World War II and was all but done for by 1960 (although visit any art school today and you'll find a would-be Willem de Kooning).
Jerry Saltz
#28. The narrative oftentimes is that everything that comes out of the hood is 'real,' and so I thought, 'I'll base it on the absurd, the not real. I'll twist the idea of real on its head and see if I can get away with it. I'll make paintings that come not from a place but through an abstract gaze.'
Mark Bradford
#29. After being an Impressionist, Cubist, and an Abstract Expressionist, I was influenced by realistic artists, including Andrew Wyeth in the late '50s, and I haven't changed my style since.
Robert Bateman
#30. Abstract painting seeks to be a pure pictorial language, and thus attempts to escape the essential impurity of all languages: the recourse to signs or forms that have meanings shared by everyone.
Octavio Paz
#31. I am at war ... with the principal personage of traditional philosophy, that abstract subject who masquerades as everyone and anyone, but is really a male subject in disguise.
Pam Gems
#32. One of the most striking of abstract art's appearances is her nakedness, an art stripped bare.
Robert Motherwell
#33. But this emphasis would be lavished in vain, if it served, in your opinion, only to abstract a general type from phenomena whose particularity in our work would remain the essential thing for you, and whose original arrangement could be broken up only artificially.
Jacques Lacan
#34. At times we would have these whole cities that would take up rooms and stretch out all over the house. But they were also very abstract, like 'this piece of cardboard is a pool' and so forth.
Ellen Gallagher
#35. In a setting of formal education, one would imagine that abstract thought would be encouraged, and that questioning obvious errors within the current system wouldn't be frowned upon. Wrong again; these cunts are out to protect their pocket books and paradigms.
Scott Parker
#36. In order to detain the fleeting apparition, he must enchain it in the fetters of rule, dissect its fair proportions into abstract notions, and preserve its living spirit in a fleshless skeleton of words.
Friedrich Schiller
#37. The level on which Japan seems to have picked up on my music seems to be on a more abstract level.
James Blake
#38. No cause, no God, no abstract idea can justify the mass slaughter of innocents.
Edward Said
#39. In an abstract but real sense, Marxism arose through the breakdown first of religion and then of 'reason' as single sources of authority.
Bernard Crick
#40. The lover heals the world not by a vague and abstract love for everybody and everything, but by becoming passionate and vowing fidelity to concrete relationships, persons, institutions, and places.
Sam Keen
#41. There are moments when clear images finally begin to emerge within the abstract painting of your life.
Renee Carlino
#42. Probably no branch of mathematics has experienced a more surprising growth than has ... topology ... Considered as a most specialized and abstract subject in the early 1920's, it is today [1938] an indispensable equipment for the investigation of modern mathematical theories.
Raymond Louis Wilder
#43. In general, the heart seems to have a more reliable memory for what benefits the psyche than does the head, which has a rather unhealthy tendeny to lead an 'abstract' existence, and easily forgets that its consciousness is snuffed out the moment the heart fails its duty.
C. G. Jung
#44. A lot of the lyrical ideas do have a lot of meaning in a way, although it is somewhat abstracted.
Thurston Moore
#45. With the manipulation of abstract
symbols, an artist can send you information without sound, change your feelings and,
sometimes, even beliefs. Artists convey the unspeakable. Artists inspire.
Jonathan Culver
#46. Discipleship is based not on devotion to abstract ideals, but on devotion to a person, the Lord Jesus Christ;
Oswald Chambers
#47. The freer the soul, the more abstract painting becomes.
Marc Chagall
#48. 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
#49. I wanted to be that,
The one which was vast,
The one which laughed,
The one which surpassed,
Yes, which also collapsed.
True, it was abstract.
I wanted to be that.
I still, want to be that!
Jasleen Kaur Gumber
#50. The abstract analysis of the world by mathematics and physics rests on the concepts of space and time.
James J. Gibson
#51. What goes on in abstract art is the proclaiming of aesthetic principles ... It is in our own time that we have become aware of pure aesthetic considerations. Art never can be imitation.
Hans Hofmann
#52. 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
#53. Abstract art is a fundamental distrust of the theory of reality concocted by the eyes.
Robert Breault
#54. Mathematics is the abstract key which turns the lock of the physical universe.
John Polkinghorne
#55. Blue has no dimensions, it is beyond dimensions, whereas the other colours are not ... All colours arouse specific associative ideas, psychologically material or tangible, while blue suggests at most the sea and sky, and they, after all, are in actual, visible nature what is most abstract.
Yves Klein
#57. Our vanity, our passions, our spirit of imitation, our abstract intelligence, our habits have long been at work, and it is the task of art to undo this work of theirs, making us travel back in the direction from which we have come to the depths where what has really existed lies unknown within us.
Marcel Proust
#58. Americans tend to endorse the use of physician-assisted suicide and euthanasia when the question is abstract and hypothetical.
Ezekiel Emanuel
#59. Not only the individual experience slowly acquired, but the accumulated experience of the race, organized in language, condensed in instruments and axioms, and in what may be called the inherited intuitions
these form the multiple unity which is expressed in the abstract term experience.
George Henry Lewes
#60. Abstract expressionism was the first American art that was filled with anger as well as beauty.
Robert Motherwell
#61. 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
#62. I don't see Dior as something that could become mine. I see it as a dialogue with the women who wear it. I want to stay connected to them rather than to an abstract brand.
Raf Simons
#63. The love of the famous, like all strong passions, is quite abstract. Its intensity can be measured mathematically, and it is independent of persons.
Susan Sontag
#64. 'Look at Me' started with Rockford, Illinois and New York and the question of how much image culture was changing our inner lives. That's an abstract idea; you don't think that's going to be a rocking work of fiction, but it seemed to fuse in a way that was interesting.
Jennifer Egan
#65. For people of color - especially African Americans - the idea that racist cops might frame members of their community is no abstract notion, let alone an exercise in irrational conspiracy theorizing. Rather, it speaks to a social reality about which blacks are acutely aware.
Tim Wise
#66. Food became, for dinner parties in the sixties, what abstract expressionism had been in the fifties.
Nora Ephron
#67. 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
#68. By phonemic trans-formation into visual terms, the alphabet became a universal, abstract, static container of meaningless sounds
Marshall McLuhan
#69. Common reference to abstract labor. Marx therefore notes: "Money as a measure of value is the necessary form of appearance of the measure of value which is intrinsic to commodities, namely labour-time" (Capital, 1:188).
Anonymous
#70. We believe more readily in the abstract application of God's promises than we do in their application to us personally.
Matt Chandler
#71. Music is an essential part of everything we do. Like puppetry, music has an abstract quality which speaks to a worldwide audience in a wonderful way that nourishes the soul.
Jim Henson
#72. A city sparkles in the night
How can it glow so bright?
The neighborhoods surround the soft florescent light
Designer skyline in my head
Abstract and still well-read
You went from numbered lines to buildings overhead
Owl City
#73. The word of the Lord never comes to us as an opinion, no attempt is made to support it by argument, it comes as a definite, abstract statement of fact. So it is from the first words ... to the last, the works of the Father are declared as facts, not theories.
Anthony W. Ivins
#74. I saw money becoming more and more important everywhere. It's one of the most abstract and important inventions by human beings. At the same time, money is capable of extraordinary corruption in every kind of relationship. I tried to see how and why, more and more, money is becoming a religion.
Costa-Gavras
#75. The string connecting everything real and abstract in the universe is entangled in a thought and knotted in an idea.
Alvin Conway
#76. The more chaos there is, the more science holds on to abstract systems of control, and the more chaos is engendered.
William Irwin Thompson
#77. I've always assumed that the abstract qualities of [my] photographs are obvious. For instance, I can turn them upside down and they're still interesting to me as pictures. If you turn a picture that's not well organized upside down, it won't work.
William Eggleston
#78. Once you abstract from this, once you generalize and postulate Universals, you have departed from the creative reality, and entered the realm of static fixity, mechanism, materialism.
D.H. Lawrence
#79. The buttocks are the most aesthetically pleasing part of the body because they are non-functional. Although they conceal an essential orifice, these pointless globes are as near as the human form can ever come to abstract art.
Kenneth Tynan
#80. The concept of 'talent' is formed under completely abstract criteria, having nothing in common with reality. But the reality is such that I don't understand chess as a whole. But then again no one understands chess in its entirety. Perhaps talent is something else, in chess it is conditionality.
Alexander Morozevich
#81. Great paintings have gradations, large and small ... They serve to lift the subject off the two-dimensionality of the canvas. Gradations are an essential abstract convention.
Robert Genn
#82. The more abstract the truth you wish to teach, the more you need to seduce the senses to it.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#83. The science of operations, as derived from mathematics more especially, is a science of itself, and has its own abstract truth and value.
Ada Lovelace
#84. Climate change - for so long an abstract concern for an academic few - is no longer so abstract. Even the Bush administration's Climate Change Science Programme reports 'clear evidence of human influences on the climate system.'
Zac Goldsmith
#85. When we tell our own story, we teach the values that our choices reveal, not as abstract principals, but as our lived experience. We reveal the kind of person we are to the extent that we let others identify with us.
Marshall Ganz
#86. 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
#87. Nowadays nobody bothers, and it is considered in slightly bad taste to even raise the question of God's existence. Matters of religion are like matters of sexual preference: they are not discussed in public, and even the abstract questions are discussed only by bores.
John Rogers Searle
#88. Science fiction in particular is often assumed to be about the future, or about some abstract technological or philosophical idea, or just about 'adventure,' but writers can't build worlds out of nothing. We use bits and pieces of the real world to assemble our fictional ones.
Ann Leckie
#89. Prefer the familiar word to the far-fetched. Prefer the concrete word to the abstract. Prefer the single word to the circumlocution. Prefer the short word to the long. Prefer the Saxon word to the Romance.
Henry Watson Fowler
#90. The meaning of fiction is not abstract meaning but experienced meaning.
Flannery O'Connor
#91. [My work] looks very cinematic because it's not abstract video art. It's sometimes very narrative and since I play with film grammar in my video work, making a feature film was almost the same challenge.
Nicolas Provost
#92. 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
#93. Specific music starts feeding my imagination and gives me a landscape that corresponds somehow, in some abstract way, to the world I'm just starting to imagine.
Jim Jarmusch
#94. Abstract art places a new world, which on the surface has nothing to do with 'reality,' next to the 'real' world.
Wassily Kandinsky
#95. I finished up my graduate degree in quantum mechanics, but underwent a bit of a personal crisis, recognizing that I didn't want to do that for the rest of my life. It was too abstract, too far removed from human concerns.
Francis Collins
#96. To realize life in the abstract as noble or beautiful or humane, to set it forth so with radiance upon it, that is civilization in the arts. Shakespeare is the chief modern example of this supreme faculty of mankind.
George Edward Woodberry
#97. Revenge is a particularly interesting concept, especially the notion of whether or not it exists outside of just an abstract idea.
Christopher Nolan
#98. I am not a follower of Monet. I am not an admirer or follower of De Kooning. I am not an action painter. I am not an abstract expressionist. I am not younger or older. I will not take my hat off to any other artist living or dead in all the world. I know this.
Milton Resnick
#99. Seeing it makes a magnificent abstract concept real, and reality tends to taint even the most wonderful ideas [ ... ] - Caradoc
P.C. Cast
#100. God is love,' they once said, but we reversed that, and love, like heaven, was always just around the corner. The more difficult it was to love the particular man beside us, the more we believed in Love, abstract and total. We were waiting, always, for the incarnation. That word, made flesh.
Margaret Atwood
