Top 100 Quotes About The Abstract
#1. 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
#2. The abstract has no emotional content ... the abstract is more powerful the more abstract it is.
Cecil Balmond
#3. 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
#4. The abstract, unreal freedom of the liberal intellect was really nothing more than childish disobedience, amplified into anarchy.
Roger Scruton
#5. Learning is stronger when it matters, when the abstract is made concrete and personal.
Peter C. Brown
#6. [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
#7. 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
#9. Children in the abstract, had never appealed to me. They seemed to be loud creatures, often dripping some form of goo.
Stephenie Meyer
#10. 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
#11. 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
#12. For myself, I favored the abstract. I collected not just obsolete terms and words, but ideas.
Jasper Fforde
#13. 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
#14. 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
#15. 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
#16. 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
#17. 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
#18. The man of science, like the man of letters, is too apt to view mankind only in the abstract, selecting in his consideration only a single side of our complex and many-sided being.
James G. Frazer
#19. There is plenty of courage among us for the abstract, but not for the concrete.
Helen Keller
#20. Phylogeny and ontogeny are, therefore, the two coordinated branches of morphology. Phylogeny is the developmental history [Entwickelungsgeschichte] of the abstract, genealogical individual; ontogeny, on the other hand, is the developmental history of the concrete, morphological individual.
Ernst Haeckel
#21. I had grown up under the heroic spell of the Abstract Expressionist painters,
Pete Hamill
#22. Don't allow people to define you based on reading the abstract of your story without even reading chapter 1. Continue to write the remaining chapters.
Assegid Habtewold
#23. Conservatives are better talking about opportunity and growth in the abstract, while liberals talk more about poor people. We [americans] need a good, optimistic, conservative opportunity ideology that is totally geared toward lifting up the poor. That's what I most want to see in candidates.
Arthur C. Brooks
#24. Let woman's claim be as broad in the concrete as the abstract. We take our stand on the solidarity of humanity, the oneness of life, and the unnaturalness and injustice of all special favoritism, whether of sex, race, country, or condition. If one link of the chain is broken, the chain is broken.
Anna Julia Cooper
#25. But art and religion will always shadow one another through the abstract nouns they both invoke: truth, seriousness, imagination, sympathy, morality, transcendence.
Julian Barnes
#26. Science fiction is a way that I can go into the abstract, go into the imagination, and audiences are still willing to go along for the ride.
Nicolas Cage
#27. Basically, Sherri's idea had to do with bringing Fat's mind down from the cosmic and the abstract to the particular. She had hatched out the practical notion that nothing is more real than a large World War Two Soviet tank.
Philip K. Dick
#28. We favor the visible, the embedded, the personal, the narrated, and the tangible; we scorn the abstract.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
#29. Explain yourself!" he commanded.
"Isn't that rather much for a man to ask of a woman?"
"I don't know. I have no experience of women. In the abstract, it seems to me that every man has a
right to some explanation from the woman who has ruined his life." (page 90)
Max Beerbohm
#30. This attitude [the abstract method in mathematics] can be encapsulated in the following slogan: a mathematical object is what it does.
Timothy Gowers
#31. I know that when I finish a drawing, my anxiety level decreases. The realistic drawings are a way of pinning down an idea. I don't want to loose it. With the abstract drawings, when I'm feeling loose, I can slip into the unconscious.
Louise Bourgeois
#32. 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
#33. I embrace the abstract in photography and exist on a few bits of order extracted from the chaos of reality.
Ralph Gibson
#34. We are seldom sorry for those who need and crave our pity - we reserve this for those who, by other means, make us exercise the abstract function of pity.
F Scott Fitzgerald
#35. We shall find the abstract equivalent for all forms & elements in the universe, then we shall combine them in sculptural constructions according to the mood of our inspiration.
Giacomo Balla
#36. In enabling mechanism to combine together general symbols in successions of unlimited variety and extent, a uniting link is established between the operations of matter and the abstract mental processes of the most abstract branch of mathematical science.
Ada Lovelace
#38. I came to New York, and it was fascinating and intimidating and yielding, and all the stuff it's supposed to be. But whatever the abstract essence I was seeking, I couldn't find exactly that.
Richard Greenberg
#39. Money is human happiness in the abstract; he, then, who is no longer capable of enjoying human happiness in the concrete devotes himself utterly to money.
Arthur Schopenhauer
#40. Beauty too often sacrifices to fashion. The spirit of fashion is not the beautiful, but the wilful; not the graceful, but the fantastic; not the superior in the abstract, but the superior in the worst of all concretes,-the vulgar.
Leigh Hunt
#41. You know I dislike slavery; and you fully admit the abstract wrong of it.
Abraham Lincoln
#42. I'm a fan of genre in the abstract, but at best, perhaps all we can really say when we talk about genre is that we're talking about an umbrella that covers a kind of story with certain elements.
Greg Rucka
#43. It is difficult to talk about fashion in the abstract, without a human body before my eyes, without drawings, without a choice of fabric - without a practical or visual reality.
Giorgio Armani
#44. The abstract thinking of the world is never to be expected of persons in high places ...
Walter Bagehot
#45. Lawyers must pry into the recesses of the human heart, and become well acquainted with the whole moral world, that they may discover the abstract reason of all laws.
Henry St John, 1st Viscount Bolingbroke
#46. The vanquished know war. They see through the empty jingoism of those who use the abstract words of glory, honor, and patriotism to mask the cries of the wounded, the senseless killing, war profiteering, and chest-pounding grief.
Chris Hedges
#47. It is not true that everything changes; the things that change are all the manifest and material things. There is something that does not change; and that is precisely the abstract quality, the invisible idea.
G.K. Chesterton
#48. If we want to grow as teachers
we must do something alien to academic culture: we must talk to each other about our inner lives
risky stuff in a profession that fears the personal and seeks safety in the technical, the distant, the abstract.
Parker J. Palmer
#49. Woman in the abstract is young, and, we assume, charming. As they get older they pass off the stage, somehow, into private ownership mostly, or out of it altogether.
Charlotte Perkins Gilman
#50. A lot of people go to the movies wanting the movie to be about feelings, and it's really not about that. Or rather it's about feelings in the abstract.
Steven Soderbergh
#51. Praise or blame has but a momentary effect on the man whose love of beauty in the abstract makes him a severe critic on his own works.
John Keats
#52. elders serve as conduits between the divine realm and the mundane world, making the abstract truths of spirituality accessible to the community by embodying them in their everyday behavior.
Zalman Schachter-Shalomi
#53. The spirit of an age may be best expressed in the abstract ideal arts, for the spirit itself is abstract and ideal.
Oscar Wilde
#54. Animals represent the abstract notion of acceptance. Living with these funny creatures - you kind of have to accept them. It's like a test in a way.
Shaun Tan
#55. Programming in the abstract sense is what I really enjoy. I enjoy lots of different areas of it ... I'm taking a great deal of enjoyment writing device drivers for Linux. I could also be having a good time writing a database manager or something because there are always interesting problems.
John Carmack
#56. The abstract music is just more interesting because it doesn't really have anything to say, but if it is good, it creates thoughts and feelings, and I enjoy that. For me, once the music creates those thoughts and feelings, I begin to write a song about it.
Paul Simon
#57. As a result of World War II, European artists migrated to America, enlarging the scene and diminishing Paris as the center. America was beginning its dominance of the art world with the emergence of the Abstract Expressionists.
Arne Glimcher
#58. I am more greatly moved by people who struggle to express themselves ... I prefer the abstract concept of incoherence in the face of great feeling to beautiful, full sentences that convey little emotion.
Daniel Day-Lewis
#59. It is the abstract wisdom of the soul, that understands the abstract nature of grief
S.L. Northey
#60. By itself photography cannot deal with the unseen, the remote, the internal, the abstract, it does not speak of Man, only of a man ; not of Tree, only a tree.
Neil Postman
#61. 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
#62. In the abstract art of cooking,
ingredients trump appliances,
passion supersedes expertise,
creativity triumphs over technique,
spontaneity inspires invention,
and wine makes even the worst culinary disaster taste delicious.
Bob Blumer
#63. 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
#64. Together with this outrage we may take the mutilation of the novel called The Search at the exact point where the author upholds, or appears for the moment to uphold, the doctrine that loyalty to the abstract truth must override all personal considerations;
Dorothy L. Sayers
#65. Philosophy is the abstract art of thoughts and perceptions that form colors of words and languages that paint the canvas of our minds.
Debasish Mridha
#66. If the abstract rights of man will bear discussion and explanation, those of women, by a parity of reasoning, will not shrink from the same test.
Mary Wollstonecraft
#67. We could not learn love in the abstract any more than we could learn patience and the other cardinal virtues. Just as we cannot know the "fellowship of his sufferings" without suffering, we also come to know real fellowship with our fellowmen only by serving them.
Neal A. Maxwell
#68. There is no such thing as justice in the abstract; it is merely a compact between men.
Epicurus
#69. The abstract way we think is really grounded in the concrete, bodily world much more than we thought.
John Bargh
#70. Moving across levels of the particular and the abstract, trying to avoid a transcendent purchase on the objects of study, we set ourselves up for necessary failure in order to learn how to find our way into post-foundational possibilities.
Patti Lather
#71. Many attempts have been made by writers on art and poetry to define beauty in the abstract, to express it in the most general terms, to find some universal formula for it.
Walter Pater
#72. The air-conditioning was more like a vague gesture toward the abstract idea of air-conditioning.
David Foster Wallace
#73. One act of beneficence, one act of real usefulness, is worth all the abstract sentiment in the world.
Ann Radcliffe
#74. When individuals and nations have once got in their heads the abstract concept of full-blown liberty, there is nothing like it in its uncontrollable strength.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
#75. Man can't handle the chaos. Oh, you can understand it in the abstract, as long as you don't think about it too hard. But at the core of it, whenever humans come against chaos, they deal with it in one of three ways ... Faced with chaos you will either ignore it, dance around it, or you will go mad.
Ilona Andrews
#76. People like the idea of innovation in the abstract, but when you present them with any specific innovation, they tend to reject it because it doesn't fit with what they already know.
Jessica Livingston
#77. 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
#78. 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
#79. Her elegance was in the abstract; in her gait, in her posture, even in how she breathed.
Heru Ptah
#80. 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
#81. 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
#82. The text loses its virginity simply by being staged: it's no longer the abstract ideal version; it's an event.
Tom Stoppard
#83. Really! But weren't you fearfully tempted?'
'In the abstract but not in the concrete,' said Ursula. 'When it comes to the point, one isn't even tempted - oh, if I were tempted, I'd marry like a shot. I'm only tempted NOT to.' The faces of both sisters suddenly lit up with amusement.
D.H. Lawrence
#84. The pop artists did images that anybody walking down Broadway could recognize in a split second - comics, picnic tables, men's trousers, celebrities, shower curtains, refrigerators, Coke bottles. All the great modern things that the Abstract Expressionists tried not to notice at all.
Andy Warhol
#85. Pot is great for the abstract, for when you don't have to be regimented and for when you don't need parameters. When you're creating a song, there should never be any parameters, so being high is okay because your mind can wander all over the place.
Steve "Lips" Kudlow
#86. There are two sides to life for every individual: a personal life, in which his freedom exists in proportion to the abstract nature of his interests, and an elemental life within the swarm of humanity, in which a man inevitably follows laws laid down for him.
Leo Tolstoy
#87. Death can be successfully put out of mind for the simple reason that it is beyond human experience. Death is either the abstract concept of nonexistence or the emotion of fear.
Lidiya Ginzburg
#88. It's the Abstract Expressionist approach to publishing. Throw ink at paper. Hope for pattern to emerge.
Jay McInerney
#89. I can't always reach the image in my mind ... almost never, in fact ... so that the abstract image I create is not quite there, but it gets to the point where I can leave it.
Chuck Close
#90. In the abstract world of American economists, equations run both ways; they believe that by changing the sign of a variable from plus to minus or from minus to plus or the price and quantity of x or y, the direction of historical movement can be reversed.
Robert Gilpin
#91. The irrational may be attractive in the abstract, but not in cab drives, dinner guests, or elderly relatives.
Mason Cooley
#93. The idea of space is given to the artist to change if he can. The subject matter in the abstract is space.
Willem De Kooning
#94. The art of avoiding extremes is an art that is drawn on the canvas of maturity and painted with the abstract strokes of many experiences.
T.D. Jakes
#95. If the abstract paintings show my reality, then the landscapes and still-lifes show my yearning.
Gerhard Richter
#96. The force that propels the human spirit on the clear way forward and upward is the abstract spirit.
Wassily Kandinsky
#97. As human beings we are a lot more sophisticated about each other than we are about the abstract world.
Malcolm Gladwell
#98. It would not be easy even for an unbeliever, to find a better translation of the rule of virtue from the abstract into the concrete, than to endeavor so to live that Christ would approve our life.
John Stuart Mill
#99. There are virtues which are very well in the abstract, but which, encountered in the flesh, can be a source of extreme irritation.
Patricia Wentworth
#100. None of the abstract concepts comes closer to fulfilled utopia than that of eternal peace.
Theodor Adorno
