Abstract Quotations

It is often my nature to be abstract, hidden in plain sight, or nowhere at all.

I am dominated by one thing, an irresistible, burning attraction towards the abstract.

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.

The investigations which have seemingly been the most purely abstract have often formed the foundation of the most important changes or improvements in the conditions of human life.

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

Screenwriting is always about what people say or do, whereas good writing is about a thought process or an abstract image or an internal monologue, none of which works on screen.

You have something that exists in your head, and getting that abstract thought from your head into something that actually exists is a difficult process.

I don't care if Margot is a Dame of the British Empire or older than myself. For me she represents eternal youth; there is an absolute musical quality in her beautiful body and phrasing. Because we are sincere and gifted, an intense abstract love is born between us every time we dance together.

The more horrifying this world becomes, the more art becomes abstract.

The reason I keep talking about a wife and saying the word 'wife' on stage is because it seems a funny word to me. The more you say it, the more it seems to detach from that person and become this sort of abstract thing: that you would set out to find a wife, that it would be an objective like buying a new car.

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.

Judaism lives not in an abstract creed, but in its institutions.

The most significant moment in the course of intellectual development, which gives birth to the purely human forms of practical and abstract intelligence, occurs when speech and practical activity, two previously completely independent lines of development, converge.

I'd like to explore the more abstract side of people's minds, as opposed to the usual sitcom stuff. I don't want to do the typical sitcom-type humor. I'd want to do stuff like go bowling with pineapples.

There's an interesting contrast between born Catholics and converts. Converts are often much more rule-directed. Catholicism isn't something that they breathed in from their childhood, so they think that if you don't toe the line on abstract doctrine you can't be part of the Church.

Can you design a Rorschach test that's going to make everyone feel something every time - and that looks like a Rorschach test? It's easy to show a picture of a kitten or a car accident. The question is, how abstract can you get and still get the audience to feel something when they don't know what's happening to them?

I think we're much smarter than we were. Everybody knows that abstract art can be art, and most people know that they may not like it, even if they understand there's another purpose to it.

The longer mathematics lives the more abstract - and therefore, possibly also the more practical - it becomes.

As I say, I as an abstract artist was active politically.

My colleagues and I have gone in the footsteps of our predecessors since the very first day we were called by our people to care for their future. We went any place, we looked for any avenue, we made any effort to bring about negotiations between Israel and its neighbors, negotiations without which peace remains an abstract desire.

She was good at playing abstract confusion in the same way that a midget is good at being short.

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.

It is about this very abstract sense of displacement that he feels the moment he turns off the television.

The role of the pastor is to embody the gospel. And of course to get it embodied, which you can only do with individuals, not in the abstract.

Of all the arts, music is really the most abstract.

When I conform to truth, I do not conform to an abstract principle; I conform to the nature of God.

The more chaos there is, the more science holds on to abstract systems of control, and the more chaos is engendered.

In my view, the most damaging evils that are perpetrated upon us are through some abstract notion about good, where we're willing to sacrifice individuals in the present for some great vision of an improved or perfect future.

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?

In contrast, traditional classical music starts from an abstract musical schema. This is then notated and only expressed in concrete sound as a last stage, when it is performed.

To me, a story can be both concrete and abstract, or a concrete story can hold abstractions. And abstractions are things that really can't be said so well with words.

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.'

This paper was one of my digressions into abstract economics.

In the abstract conception of universal wrong, all concrete responsibility vanishes.

A big practice in chaos magic is the use of sigils, which are abstract words or symbols you create and embed with your wishes.

None of the abstract concepts comes closer to fulfilled utopia than that of eternal peace.

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.

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.

You're assisting the audience to understand; you're giving them a bridge or an access. And if you don't give them that, if you keep it more abstract, it's almost more pure. It's a cooler thing.

Voting is like alchemy - taking an abstract value and breathing life into it.

It is easier to take a position in the abstract than when it hits home.

From Shakespeare to Robi Thakur, everyone has written stories about people and incidents around them. There is no creativity minus reality irrespective of how flowery or abstract you make it.

Mother liked beauty wherever she found it, and she found it in many different places, both in nature and in contemporary art. And that's where they pretty much parted company. Father... anything that was abstract would to him automatically be not very good.

Writing laws based on an abstract theory, rather than reality, is a dangerous undertaking.

To those who have exhausted politics, nothing remains but abstract thought.

Exclusively of the abstract sciences, the largest and worthiest portion of our knowledge consists of aphorisms: and the greatest and best of men is but an aphorism.

I say a murder is abstract. You pull the trigger and after that you do not understand anything that happens.

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.

Man is alone everywhere. But the solitude of the Mexican, under the great stone night of the high plateau that is still inhabited by insatiable gods, is very different from that of the North American, who wanders in an abstract world of machines, fellow citizens and moral precepts.

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

The spirit of an age may be best expressed in the abstract ideal arts, for the spirit itself is abstract and ideal.

Most professional women I know - myself included - long since gave up looking for a rulebook or a roadmap; we make it up as we go along. Every day presents a new choice, a new challenge, which makes long-term career planning seem like an especially abstract exercise.

The universe is governed by science. But science tells us that we can't solve the equations, directly in the abstract.

The positive side of that is that TV shows and movies can really help people see the connection between what might be an abstract Washington policy issue and real people's lives, even though it's fictional real people,

With the Larry Bertlemann portrait, I started with a photograph that I could use for it. I built the drawing's identity to serve as a graphic identity. After a number of sketches, I went into my own abstract vernacular of drawn lines and shapes to create the composition for the poster design.

I always say that modernization is not an abstract thing; its a very specific task.

Most people would have found it grotesque, but when you're in love nothing is so abstract or horrible that it can't be thought of as cute.

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

I paint abstract expressions.

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.

The physical world is entirely abstract and without actuality apart from its linkage to consciousness.

To abstract is to draw out the essence of a matter.

The court took a standard that was intelligible, easy to apply and turned it into something that is subjective, abstract and impressionistic.

No cause, no God, no abstract idea can justify the mass slaughter of innocents.

The process by which civilization, as an abstract entity distinct from the societies in which it is embodied, dies or is reborn is a very significant one.

fashion seems to exist for an abstract person who is not you or me.

I wanted to be a painter, somewhere between Abstract Expressionism and Pop.

Mahler's first symphony is not a typical symphony in that it's not abstract music; it does conjure up images of nature and images of heroism.

Since multinational giants couldn't have little pictures of red barns or weeping clowns in the lobbies of their Bauhaus buildings, Abstract Expressionism emerged as the world's most overrated form of interior decoration.

No one suggests that John Roberts was motivated by bigotry or animosity toward minorities or women, ... But these memos lead one to question whether he truly appreciated the history of the civil rights struggle. He wrote about discrimination as an abstract concept, not as a flesh and blood reality for countless of his fellow citizens.

If we're going to teach it to all kids -- kids who might not naturally be abstract learners -- we need a variety of teaching methods.

I got out of Columbia and then into the American Abstract Artist group, which had almost all the abstract artists in the coutry in it, about 40 or 50.

I am truly excited about the quality of these three major sculptures, but also about the diversity of contemporary art being acquired by the museum. The range of work, from abstract to pop art to contemporary realism, demonstrate great breadth and significantly enhance the public art program in our area.

But certainly the Abstract Expressionists were in a more romantic mode of painting, or give and take, than my paintings are seen to be anyway.

I'm a lot more interested in people than I used to be. I used to be most interested in abstract ideas, and people were an afterthought, but that's changed a bit.

I love abstract art because when it is good, it can put the viewer in touch with who they are beyond their culture, psychology, history or personality.

If I painted him I would probably just paint like his eye -- completely just beet red because it had some many drugs in it or something. Or maybe just a zoom in on a forearm or something ... just where it looks like an abstract painting but it's just veins.

Frary executed tremendous abstract paintings. Frary contributed significantly to mid-century modernist art in Texas.

For so many Americans, what goes on here in Washington often seems abstract and remote, unrelated to their daily concerns,

If you abstract away to the business logic, then you can just deal with that rather than having to worry about the system behind it.

What you're seeing right now with Katrina mirrors a lot of what the government does not do for families of Guard and Reserve soldiers: Throwing money at abstract concepts they love to do that but they really don't know how many of these families are suffering,

Rights! There are no rights whatever without corresponding duties. Look at the history of the growth of our constitution, and you will see that our ancestors never upon any occasion stated, as a ground for claiming any of their privileges, an abstract right inherent in themselves; you will nowhere in our parliamentary records find the miserable sophism of the Rights of Man.

Restoring the canyon is no longer an abstract notion now that people can actually experience its beauty.

Part of what I love about games is that, even if you're best friends with somebody, it gives you these sort of moments where you get to interact on a completely different level. You all agree to these abstract rules, but there's nobody holding a gun to your head.

Our language is polarized. Concrete words are usually the language of poets. Abstract words are usually the language of politicians.

I thought it was upturned tables. But when I got closer I realized it was definitely art because it's bolted to the ground. And on further inspection it looks like somebody's car, an abstract version of somebody's car.

The algorithm the computational method for language learning and processing that we have developed can take a body of text, abstract from it a collection of recurring patterns or rules and then generate new material,

The algorithm -- the computational method -- for language learning and processing that we have developed can take a body of text, abstract from it a collection of recurring patterns or rules and then generate new material,

The ABC of our profession is to avoid these large abstract terms in order to try to discover behind them the only concrete realities, which are human beings.

Usually there's some kind of clue, whether it's a rhythmic foundation or sometimes its very abstract - just an emotional kind of landscape - and then you just kind of start someplace.

Wheelock was a man who would take an abstract concept and make it work.

Yeah, all the characters in those days were abstract because that was part of the principle that I was working under, that you wanted abstract things.

The only way to say what abstract is, is to say what it is not.

The Analytical Engine is an embodying of the science of operations, constructed with peculiar reference to abstract number as the subject of those operations.

Every three minutes a woman is being raped. Every eighteen seconds a woman is being beaten. There is nothing abstract about it. It is happening right now as I am speaking.

Quantum physics is no longer an abstract theory for specialists. We must now absolutely include it in our education and also in our culture.

When you're working with an object, you can put in almost anything you want, you can make it abstract.

I don't do abstract art because I don't find it as interesting as I do subjects and depictions.

Funerals are all abstract ceremony.

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