Quotes About Abstract

I can never fathom it when people say things like "I can't understand abstract art!" Or: "Abstract art is junk!" Or: "Abstract art isn't as valid as realism!"

Well, good science fiction is intelligent. It asks big questions that are on people's minds. It's not impossible. It has some sort of root in the abstract. So automatically you're getting closer to potentially divine sources of interest because it is abstract. It's one of the only ways that a film actor can express himself in the abstract and have audiences still go along for the ride. They don't contend it. They accept it, that they're going to go places that are a bit more of the imagination, a bit more out there, and that's more and more where I like to dance.

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.

Delight at having understood a very abstract and obscure system leads most people to believe in the truth of what it demonstrates.

One of the problems with watching TV is that you've got a fairly low level of language operating all the time. Quite a small vocabulary and really no conceptual or abstract thinking. That's an issue. If you've got a wide vocabulary, you can learn. The complexities of grammar, in themselves, force you to think about time in a particular way. Force you to widen your outlook on the world.

A mismatched outfit, a slightly defective denture, an exquisite mediocrity of the soul-those are the details that make a woman real, alive. The women you see on posters or in fashion magazines-the ones all the women try to imitate nowadays-how can they be attractive? They have no reality of their own; they're just the sum of a set of abstract rules. They aren't born of human bodies; they hatch ready-made from the computers." ~The Book of Laughter and Forgetting

That is my morality or my metaphysics or me myself: a passer-by in everything, even my own soul. I belong to nothing, I desire nothing, I am nothing except an abstract centre of impersonal sensations, a sentient mirror fallen from the wall but still turned to reflect the diversity of the world.

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

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

patriarchal academic hierarchies in science and technology are now overspecialized and abstract, perhaps because they have systematically excluded women, as well as minorities, with challenging, alternative views.

That’s the huge problem with an abstract painting. When are you done? You’re done when you don’t want to do it anymore.

When you start to really travel and you get to these abstract like places in the world, you would see certain people's names. It seemed like we could go anywhere. Like when we went to Afghanistan, you'd see in the dressing room Run DMC's name. Certain rappers are like journey men.

It is all too easy for a society to measure itself against some abstract philosophical principle or political slogan. But in the end, there must remain the question: What kind of life is one society providing to the people that live in it?

Thinking - in particular abstract thinking, which most of us are introduced to through the study of mathematics and literature - helps us learn that we can become problem solvers.

The US and Israel have demanded further that Palestinians not only recognize Israel's rights as a state in the international system, but that they also recognize Israel's abstract right to exist, a concept that has no place in international law or diplomacy, and a right claimed by no one. In effect, the US and Israel are demanding that Palestinians . . . formally accept the legitimacy of their expulsion from their own land. They cannot be expected to accept that, just as Mexico does not grant the US the right to exist on half of Mexico's territory, gained by conquest.

Soldiers join the military to serve their country, but when bullets are flying, it's hard to fight for an abstract notion like patriotism. They're fighting for the people standing next to them, and it doesn't matter who's a Republican or a Democrat, or who's black or white or Christian or Muslim or gay or straight. If Congress and all Americans could manage to ignore those differences, we would have a perfect country, but somehow we cannot rise to that level of nobility.

It is rational to choose the right means to your ends to develop very elegant abstract formal theories of rational choice, and then turn these into what look like moral theories. Philosophers tend to be ravished by the formal beauty of such theories, and they don't pay much attention to the fact that our human limitations make them pretty useless in practice, while the simple point about instrumental reasoning is too shallow to be of much real moral interest.

When I'm not working on a children's book, I'm painting abstract paintings. That's probably the most joyous thing for me as an artist. But I do love children's books.

The sickness of indulging desires can be treated, but the sickness of clinging to abstract principles is hard to treat. Obstacles presented by events and objects can be removed, but obstacles presented by social principles are hard to remove.

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

The real test of compassion is not what we say in abstract discussions but how we conduct ourselves in daily life.

Our visual cortexes are wired to quickly recognize faces and then quickly subtract massive amounts of detail from them, zeroing in on their essential message: Is this person happy? Angry? Fearful? Individual faces may vary greatly, but a smirk on one is a lot like a smirk on another. Smirks are conceptual, not pictorial. Our brains are like cartoonists - and cartoonists are like our brains, simplifying and exaggerating, subordinating facial detail to abstract comic concepts.

There was something about the self-confession and self-confusion of Abstract expressionism - as though the man and the work were the same - that personally always put me off because at that time my focus was in the opposite direction.

And also the new excitement and variety of ways that the abstract expressionists were applying paint. You could put it on as though it were colored air and it would be painting.

Plain experience and common sense inform us that no abstract Person can have made us as we are without also wishing to delete us and start over (Gen. 8:21; Zeph. 1:2). Therefore, the existence of cruel and arbitrary nature, together with the universality of human sin, prevents us from beginning the theological enterprise with any concept of God that is distinct from revelation. All theologies of a cosmic harmonic principle shipwreck on the truths of tragedy, catastrophe, and injustice.

Arithmetic has a very great and elevating effect, compelling the soul to reason about abstract number, and rebelling against the introduction of visible or tngible objects into the argument.

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

Music, the most abstract and uncanny art, is an eternal river of sound moving through time. We can free ourselves from whatever may be holding us back, and join that flowing river.

I would say that it is important to have it in your mind, what your attention is and what you want to do. Really just go for it, and fall and go for it again, and learn and continue to go for it. First, it starts as an abstract idea and you have this dream and desire. It will take you to one place, and in that time you act in a certain way and you do what you have to do in that one place to get you to the next place. It is constantly building into this idea that you have.

If things are too similar, the dialogue is not very interesting. If you put in contrast, big and small, abstract and representational, you set up the possibility of a discourse.

Time, that most abstract of humanity's homes.

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.

Painting is a duality and abstract painting is an entirely aesthetic thing. It always remains on one level. It is only really interesting in the beauty of its patterns or its shapes.

I love when rappers have a off-beat, very abstract timing, and he certainly did.And any rapper who really approaches rapping with the art form of songwriting melodically - I know a bunch of rappers who actually go in before they write the lyrics and come up with the melody. And you can hear and feel that difference so much when that's the case.

People think of security as a noun, something you go buy. In reality, it's an abstract concept like happiness. Openness is unbelievably helpful to security.

It is simply wrong to begin with a theme, symbol or other abstract unifying agent, and then try to force characters and events to conform to it.

When you're trying to solve a problem on a new product type, you become completely focused on problems that seem a number of steps removed from the main product. That problem solving can appear a little abstract, and it is easy to lose sight of the product.

Love is an abstract noun, something nebulous. And yet love turns out to be the only part of us that is solid, as the world turns upside down and the screen goes black.

Whatever an artist's personal feelings are, as soon as an artist fills a certain area on the canvas or circumscribes it, he becomes historical. He acts from or upon other artists. An artist is someone who makes art too. He did not invent it. How it started — "to hell with it." It is obvious that it has no progress. The idea of space is given him to change if he can. The subject matter in the abstract is space. He fills it with an attitude. The attitude never comes from himself alone.

The difference between what we see and a sheet of white paper with a few thin lines on it is very great. Yet this abstraction is one which we seem to have adopted almost instinctively at an early stage in our development, not only in Neolithic graffiti but in early Egyptian drawings. And in spite of its abstract character, the outline is responsive to the least tremor of sensibility.

I started realizing that one of the great things about opera is that if you make the right kind of story, you can still have this kind of abstract subliminal quality to take you on a journey, but you can root it just enough in a particular situation, a particular kind of real situation that a person might have, or a particular context in the real world.

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

The world is moving into a phase when landscape design may well be recognized as the most comprehensive of the arts. Man creates around him an environment that is a projection into nature of his abstract ideas. It is only in the present century that the collective landscape has emerged as a social necessity. We are promoting a landscape art on a scale never conceived of in history.

Art bids us touch and taste and hear and see the world, and shrinks from what Blake calls mathematic form, from every abstract form, from all that is of the brain only.

Because of his capacity for abstract communications and language and his ability to enter in imagination into the lives of others, man is able to build organizations of a size and complexity far beyond those of the lower animals.

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.

Modern abstract art starts in Russia in about 1915 with Malevich, and then the Russian Revolution happens, and eventually all that experimental art gets squashed and social realism comes back into play. All of a sudden, Malevich is no longer painting black squares; he's painting peasants in colorful schmattas.

Our biggest challenge in this new century is to take an idea that seems abstract - sustainable development - and turn it into a reality for all the world's people