Abstract Quotations | Page 2

With a live audience, it's very clear when you've pushed it too far to the edge - because you fall off that edge and hit bottom with a thud. Nothing abstract about that. You know you went too far when you hear that groan or worse - that silence instead of the big laugh you were expecting following your hilariously edgy joke.

When driving on road, there is a statement said 'Drive safely!' Well, it was too abstract for me. Three things that make it practical: 1. Movement. Don't create a sudden movement to your vehicle. 2. Distance. Keep distance not too close with anything around. 3. The Eyes. Don't ever divert your eyes off the road.

We think we think in a very literal way, but if you really ponder it, you don't think in a literal way. You're seeing in a literal way, and you're going from point A to point B, but if you really consciously think back at what was going through your mind when you went from point A to point B, you'll find that it's a very abstract process.

You are well aware that I come to these proceedings to be judged as a judge. ... It would be wrong for me to say or to preview in this legislative chamber how I would cast my vote on questions the Supreme Court may be called upon to decide. ... Judges in our ... system are bound to decide concrete cases, not abstract issues. ... A judge sworn to decide impartially can offer no forecasts, no hints. ... It would display disdain for the entire judicial process.

What attracted me to it was a series of X-ray photographs of the internals of those beautiful abstract works,

This song probably has the most memorable melody we've ever recorded. I really like how we're using something so catchy to convey these abstract lyrical ideas I have about songwriting. When I sit down to write a song, I always feel like I'm wading into a river where a nurturing female presence guides me and pushes me along when I need it.

This no longer puts the abortion issue in the abstract with the Supreme Court. This is as live a controversy as you can get.

Everything is so abstract at this point. All that has to be worked out.

Every innovation occasions more harm and and derangement of order by its novelty, than benefit by its abstract utility

Cyberspace was a consensual hallucination that felt and looked like a physical space but actually was a computer-generated construct representing abstract data.

The tools used by economists to analyze business firms are too abstract and speculative to offer any guidance to entrepreneurs and managers in their constant struggle to bring novel products to consumers at low cost.

I started with things that I was troubled by or confused by or interested in, and then I wrote stories to try to puzzle my way through it. But the question is not how to represent war, because it's an abstract thing that's felt differently for all the characters.

I sometimes wish I had been educated a Catholic, in order to unite the poetry of religion with its higher principles. Are they necessarily inseparable? Is man really so much of a philosopher, that he can conceive of truth in its abstract purity, and divest life and the affections of all the aids of the imagination?

I've been doing a lot of abstract painting lately, extremely abstract. No brush, no paint, no canvas, I just think about it.

I've said this before - and I mean it strongly - an abstract concept or a moral issue has to be connected to feeling. If we don't believe it somehow viscerally, we don't really take it in.

It was the point where things became much more abstract and less literal than in the bulk of the film, which was hardcore rockets and space and planets - all a fairly straightforward evolution from what I had been doing before.

It was all done at the same time. We sort of arranged the whole thing and cut it in half. A good example is an artist who does two canvases. He paints an abstract painting and then splits them. He shows the public the first piece and has them get used to that first piece. Then he gets the second piece and lets them get used to it, and then he puts them together and lets them see how they make sense together. So they make sense separately, but they also make sense together.

Proxies should be competent, adequately informed, emotionally stable and committed to your interests. They're expected to decide as if they were you -- that is, based on their best knowledge of your values and your beliefs and not based on their own values and beliefs or some kind of abstract best interest.

Rather, classical liberals and libertarians argue that the system of justice should abstract from the concrete characteristics of individuals.

Something to Look Forward To' pays homage to the talent, vision and persistence of particular black artists who have created dynamic abstract images and objects during extended and successful careers.

The more abstract the truth you want to teach, the more thoroughly you must seduce the senses to accept it.

A soldier is a man whose business it is to kill those who never offended him, and who are the innocent martyrs of other men's iniquities. Whatever may become of the abstract question of the justifiableness of war, it seems impossible that the soldier should not be a depraved and unnatural thing.

You see the ribbon on cars and trucks and flags in places and it is so abstract until it hits your family.

A lot of my work is about what's abstract and what's pictorial. Is it bubblegum, or is it an abstract painting using bubblegum? The energy comes from walking that line and watching things dip this way and that.

Americans are not fighting nor being targeted by an abstract called terrorism, but a growing body of ideological concepts. They need to know what is it they are up against.

They're not collections based on an abstract definition of pretty, it's all what a sophisticated consumer would find charming.

Abstract art is a product of the untalented, sold by the unprincipled to the utterly bewildered.

It's extremely important that we bring clarity to this question of 'who's in charge' long in advance of an actual crisis, or else the potential for chaos and delay on the scene will be very real if, God forbid, we are actually confronted by one of these nightmare scenarios. So this is not an abstract argument, ... While the Defense Department will have the legal responsibility to assist civil authorities, when requested, in the event of a serious crisis -- and indeed has resources, troops, and capabilities that no other agency can duplicate -- the new rubric outlined in the National Response Plan clearly identifies the secretary of Homeland Security as the guy at the top making judgments about how the federal government will respond.

It's not some abstract thing, to support the arts, ... It's a very vital part of our lives.

It's like communism, in an abstract manner. No matter how many gold medals these Temecula boys give each other, in my opinion, they're afraid of the quality of my wine.

Everybody is for peace. Nobody says they're against it. But we really wanted to take this abstract idea and put a human face to it, and let people know the idea of peaceful resolution isn't just something that needs to happen on the far side of the globe. It's something that needs to happen here too.

A painting... is just one image. It allows you to elaborate, dwell on that one picture, go off on it because no further images are forced upon you. But the motion picture is always changing. So what you have to do is create some kind of eye field, an abstract form in a literal sense that tries to emulate what the brain is perceiving, not what the eye is seeing.

I'm fascinated by how much has changed from one generation to another. There are young people growing up now for whom apartheid is just a distant memory and the idea of military service is an abstract notion.

In 1971, I put together the 'Johnny Face' drawing as a concept, with the words as part of an image in a circle. Combining my abstract drawing with the headline 'Crazy World Ain't It' created an emblem and became a button.

Initially, I thought this is an abhorrent violence being foisted upon these great, still, abstract performances. And quite the opposite is apparent in the photographs - it's almost like looking at photographs of the canals of Mars or something. This tremendous inner softness emerges as the works are exposed.

In another 10,000 or 20,000 years, I think the human brain may acquire a form that is quite different than the human brain today. Not necessarily in its shape, which may remain relatively the same. But the function may be different. It may be, on average, a little smarter. Or it may acquire certain skills that in its current form it isn't well-equipped to handle -- advanced cognitive abilities such as abstract reasoning. We don't really know for sure how -- but we are still evolving.

I'm just really impressed by oil paintings - I don't see how people do it! That's the style I like: classic oil paintings. Abstract art just isn't my thing.

I really don't think it would be wise to speculate in an abstract way about the circumstances in which it might be on the agenda.

Calls for the simplification of abstract or allusive art have always come from governments suspicious of artists themselves. This is why totalitarian regimes have always legislated some form of realism.

I didn't just want to make an abstract ballet. I wanted to create an idea. I came up with the theme of a poet, an artist or a musician searching for inspiration from a muse, from a beautiful woman.

The complexity of software is an essential property, not an accidental one. Hence, descriptions of a software entity that abstract away its complexity often abstracts away its essence.

A picture is not a window...an abstract refers to no reality but its own.

In abstract love of humanity one almost always only loves oneself.

Americans have no capacity for abstract thought, and make bad coffee.

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.

Abstract pictures are fictive models, because they make visible a reality that we can neither see nor describe, but whose existence we can postulate.

Film is abstract, not definite. It is a dream.

Abstract propositions should never be discussed by a legislative body.

Iconic clothing has been secularized. A guardsman in a dress uniform is ostensibly an icon of aggression; his coat is red as the blood he hopes to shed. Seen on a coat-hanger, with no man inside it, the uniform loses all its blustering significance and, to the innocent eye seduced by decorative color and tactile braid, it is as abstract in symbolic information as a parasol to an Eskimo. It becomes simply magnificent.

Nothing is more abstract than reality.

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.

I wanted to be an abstract painter, but I was rotten at it.

Do not be deluded by the abstract word Freedom. Whose freedom? Not the freedom of one individual in relation to another, but freedom of Capital to crush the worker.

The power to love what is purely abstract is given to few.

Relativity is inherently convergent, though convergent toward a plurality of centers of abstract truths.

Freedom is an abstract offshoot. You can't describe freedom. How can you describe it? I tried and I failed.

As far as Marx's analysis of capitalism, there's a lot of very useful ideas in it, but he's developing an abstract model of 19th century capitalism. It's abstract and it's changed.

All representations of a thing are inherently abstract.

But it is a pipe." "No, it's not," I said. It's a drawing of a pipe. Get it? All representations of a thing are inherently abstract. It's very clever.

By phonemic trans-formation into visual terms, the alphabet became a universal, abstract, static container of meaningless sounds

My art is not abstract, it lives and breathes

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.

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.

Food became, for dinner parties in the sixties, what abstract expressionism had been in the fifties.

All good art is abstract.

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.

The truth is, the difference between a studio photographer and a photojournalist is the same as the difference between a political cartoonist and an abstract painter; the only thing the two have in common is the blank page. The jobs entail different talents and different desires.

It [abstract art] should be enjoyed just as music is enjoyed after a while you may like it or you may not.

The courses I took were very rigorous and demanding, teaching me how to draw from real life. I started to get bored with that mode of expression as I found it to be too repetitive. I was looking to push myself to do something different and abstract art seemed to be the perfect outlet for that.

The truths of the Bible are never just abstract concepts; they're always related to real people.

Abstract Expressionism was invented by New York drunks.

The difference from project to project is that departure point. In this case, it was really an abstract idea, an issue of citizenship, but it might be a Chekhov short story or a story from 'The Iliad.' You can really fit anything in there, but what's consistent is that the writer and the director are chosen, the actors are all present before the play begins.

America thrives on identity politics, left and right. But France is opposed to the idea. Since the Revolution, the French have enthroned the idea of universalism. All of us must be equal before the law as abstract individuals, and that extends to the arts.

The meaning for the average person watching the ... demonstrations is that this is a very serious movement, a large issue, and it's not going to go away. People now have a face and they have a story that goes along with what they had previously viewed as a pretty abstract concept, illegal immigration.

Talk with M. Hermite. He never evokes a concrete image, yet you soon perceive that the more abstract entities are to him like living creatures.

I guess my experience with some stuff is kind of abstract.

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.

I wanted to make abstract films that are emotional, and I still do.

Detailed descriptions, abstract ambitions, relevant observations, your's and mine.

A trilogy is a pretty abstract notion. You can apply it to almost any three things.

Considerable sacrifices were demanded of the inhabitants of the machine in order that purely abstract formal development... might be carried as far as possible.

I try to make concrete that which is abstract.

Theater is far superior to film in poetry, in abstract poetry.

In Calvinism and sectarianism man became more and more transformed into an abstract moral subject, as in Descartes he was considered an epistemological subject.

All good art is abstract in its structure.

His gaze brushed over her, abstract and hungry. "You burn so very brightly, you know" "Yeah," she muttered. "You said.

I'm interested in producing truncated shapes in proportion to the frame and composition, shapes that are preferably luminous. I'm not interested in the full-figure. I want to abstract forms.

I wear my pants on my upper torso to be abstract and different.

You've got a lot of time for abstract thought when you've got your hand stuck up a dead badger.

You make knowledge relevant to life and you make it important for children to learn things that will really relate to things going on in their lives, and not abstract.

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.

The abstract kills, the concrete saves.

Oh abstractions are just abstract until they have an ache in them.

Children in the abstract, had never appealed to me. They seemed to be loud creatures, often dripping some form of goo.

Abstract expressionism was the first American art that was filled with anger as well as beauty.

One of the most striking of abstract art's appearances is her nakedness, an art stripped bare.

I have been continuously aware that in painting, I am always dealing with... a relational structure. Which in turn makes permission 'to be abstract' no problem at all.

The abstract, unreal freedom of the liberal intellect was really nothing more than childish disobedience, amplified into anarchy.

You have to have the time to feel sorry for yourself in order to be a good abstract expressionist.

Time, that most abstract of humanity's homes.