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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 DumasThe Human subject is the most important thing. My work is abstract in the sense of having been designed and composed, but it is not abstract in the sense of having no human content I want to communicate. I want the idea to strike right away.
Jacob LawrenceLife holds many, many, many mysteries, abstract things we all think about. In a film when things get abstract, some people don't appreciate that and they want to leave the theater. Others love to dream, get lost, try to figure things out. I'm one of those people. I like a film, a story that holds concrete things but also abstractions. So when ideas come along that have those things, I'm falling in love and going to work.
David LynchAbstract painters: redefine your perspectives. Think in terms of the whole, not simply its parts.
Joshua L. GoldbergIt is only through fiction and the dimension of the imaginary that we can learn something real about individual experience. Any other approach is bound to be general and abstract.
Nicola ChiaromonteThe movement of abstract art... bears within itself at almost every point the mark of the changing material and psychological conditions surrounding modern culture.
Meyer SchapiroElectronic music lends itself to an abstract way of storytelling, so it keeps evolving. Theres a whole movement truly driving music further and there is no other music innovating as much as film music
Hans ZimmerSeurat and Signac mixed paintings with the dry and abstract laws of science. This approach, in my opinion, usually strays from the purpose of art in general. Because it means that one cannot expect from an artifact, that is created with mathematical laws, to establish an improbable and irrational relationship between the work and the viewer.
Guity NovinThe abstract, unreal freedom of the liberal intellect was really nothing more than childish disobedience, amplified into anarchy.
Roger ScrutonShe was good at playing abstract confusion in the same way that a midget is good at being short.
Clive JamesEthics is not just an abstract intellectual discipline. It is about the conflicts that arise in trying to meet real human needs and values.
John ZimanThatโs the huge problem with an abstract painting. When are you done? Youโre done when you donโt want to do it anymore.
Amy SillmanThere is no branch of mathematics, however abstract, which may not some day be applied to phenomena of the real world.
Nikolai LobachevskySometimes I'll have an end in mind, but it's always false, always corny, just a dumb idea anyone could have, sitting on a barstool. An abstract thesis with no real life inside it. And then I start writing and the writing itself confounds me, taking away the comfort of knowing the end in advance. How is that even possible? Doesn't the conclusion come at the end? How can you begin with one - that seems odd, right?
Charles D'AmbrosioIt 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?
Hubert H. HumphreySexuality is primarily a means of communicating with other people, a way of talking to them, of expressing our feelings about ourselves and them. It is essentially a language, a body language, in which one can express gentleness and affection, anger and resentment, superiority and dependence far more succinctly than would be possible verbally, where expressions are unavoidably abstract and often clumsy.
Robert C. SolomonAbstract and conceptual painters face different demons than representational painters, but neither group has a monopoly on either authenticity or originality.
Steven WhitneyA true noun, an isolated thing, does not exit in nature. Things are only the terminal points, or rather the meeting points of actions, cross sections cut through actions, snapshots. Neither can a pure verb, an abstract motion, be possible in nature. The eye sees noun and verb as one, things in motion, motion in things.
Ernest FenollosaIf you hand an adult a lump of clay, they're likely to respond by fashioning something representative out of the raw material. For the most part, they'll simply forge an object that signifies something "real" in the world, even if that something is as abstract as an emotion or an energy. A child, on the other hand, will just as often produce something totally without semiotic meaning, a shape or a mass that represents nothing that exists outside of their imagination. Or else, they'll eat it or throw it or ignore it, wholesale.
Keith MurrayDo 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.
Karl MarxAbstraction allows man to see with his mind what he cannot physically see with his eyes... Abstract art enables the artist to perceive beyond the tangible, to extract the infinite out of the finite. It is the emancipation of the mind. It is an explosion into unknown areas.
Arshile GorkyI love monsters. If I go to a church, I'm more interested in the gargoyles than the saints. I really don't care much about the idea of normal - that's very abstract to me. I think that perfection is practically unattainable but imperfection is right at hand. So that's why I love monsters: because they represent a side of us we should actually embrace and celebrate.
Guillermo del ToroCentralize property in the hands of a few and the millions are under bondage to property - a bondage as absolute and deplorable as if their limbs were covered with manacles. Abstract all property from the hands of labor and you thereby reduce labor to dependence; and that dependence becomes as complete a servitude as the master could fix upon his slave.
Lewis Henry MorganA mathematician is an๏ปฟ individual who calls himself a 'physicist' and does 'physics' and physical experiments with abstract concepts.
Bill GaedeThe minute I start to talk about acting, I realize that I can't. You know, it's an abstract thing, a little bit mysterious even if you do it for a living.
Christopher WalkenThe artists catch what's in the air. It's not because the artist "felt like it" or is a guru who channels the truth of the universe in some opaque, abstract way, or even in a realistic painting. The comics artist is someone who has the humility to set himself up in public culture and to communicate with the reader. If your image doesn't make sense, it's your problem, and I shouldn't publish it.
Francoise MoulyThere 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.
Robert RauschenbergIt is really something, the extent to which we allow ourselves to live without thinking of things that we know, in the abstract, are bad, and are going on right now, somewhere far away. We think, "Well, what are you gonna do?" In a way, that little instinct, that "What are you gonna do?" is the most dangerous thing in the world.
Ben H. WintersCondemnation by category is the lowest form of hatred, for it is cold-hearted and abstract, lacking even the courage of a personal hatred.
Wendell BerryIt 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 MillThere's a tiredness of abstract inteligence, and it's the most horrible of tirednesses. It doesn't weight on you like the tiredness of the body, nor does it worry you like the tiredness of knowledge and emotion. It's a weightiness of the conscience of the world, an inability of the soul to breathe.
Fernando PessoaTo love God and neighbor is not something abstract, but profoundly concrete: it means seeing in every person and face of the Lord to be served, to serve him concretely. And you are, dear brothers and sisters, in the face of Jesus.
Pope FrancisPlotinus, when he thinks about mind or intellect, the Greek word is 'nous', he thinks about something that's very different, it's much more elevated and special, more abstract, you might say more philosophical than the very broad range of mental events that we talk about in contemporary philosophy of mind.
Peter AdamsonPeople are very good [at] thinking about agents. The mind is set really beautifully to think about agents. Agents have traits. Agents have behaviors. We understand agents. We form global impression of their personalities. We are really not very good at remembering sentences where the subject of the sentence is an abstract notion.
Daniel KahnemanThe irrational may be attractive in the abstract, but not in cab drives, dinner guests, or elderly relatives.
Mason CooleyNothing as drastic an innovation as abstract art could have come in to existence, save as the consequence of a most profound, relentless, unquenchable need. The need is for felt experience - intense, immediate, direct, subtle, unified, warm, vivid, rhythmic.
Robert MotherwellA โfraternityโ is the antithesis offraternity. The first (that is, the order or organization) is predicated on the idea of exclusion; the second (that is, the abstract thing) is based on a feeling of total equality.
E. B. WhiteI never use nature as a starting point. I never abstract from nature; I never consciously think of nature when I paint.
Adolph GottliebIt's very nice to have someone that you can have a completely abstract conversation with and leave the room, feel like everything's fine, and then realize that if you pick it apart, you have absolutely no idea what either of you said.
Tim BurtonYou believe in equality for women and men. And that means that, not only do you believe in it kind of in the abstract but you actively think people should seek it when it comes to the way you hire people, the way you compensate people, the way you treat women and men in professional settings and school, whatever the case, giving them equal opportunities without disadvantaging them because of their, for the fact that they're women. And to me that's what it means for me to be a feminist. I don't think it's that controversial.
John LegendThese days people believe they can go into art and make a living. We didn't have that. The abstract expressionists were older, by the time they even got a show. Now people come right out of school and sell.
Brice MardenFriendship's an abstract of this noble flame, 'Tis love refin'd, and purged from all its dross, 'Tis next to angel's love, if not the same, As strong in passion is, though not so gross.
Katherine PhilipsOnce we have taken the backward step to an abstract view of our whole system of beliefs, evidence, and justification, and seen that it works only, despite its pretensions, by taking the world largely for granted, we are not in a position to contrast all these appearances with an alternative reality. We cannot shed our ordinary responses, and if we could it would leave us with no means of conceiving a reality of any kind.
Thomas NagelThat is what the highest criticism really is, the record of one's own soul. It is more fascinating than history, as it is concerned simply with oneself. It is more delightful than philosophy, as its subject is concrete and not abstract, real and not vague. It is the only civilized form of autobiography.
Oscar WildeI'm an abstract painter not just for myself, but because I really believe in abstraction.
Brice MardenWe often judge cities by great public buildings. But we admire great cities because people live there in a beautiful way. You have to think about how each person will live there; you can't just think about abstract ideas.
Daniel LibeskindIt is a mistake to think of these men as visionary dreamers, playing around at Philadelphia with abstract conceptions of political theory, pulling a whole scheme of government out of the air like a rabbit out of a hat. True, many of them had read and studied enough about the science of politics to put the average statesman of today to shame. But political science was to them an extremely practical topic of discussion, dealing with the extremely practical business of running a government--not, as today, a branch of higher learning reserved for the use of graduate students.
Fred Rodell