Quotes About Abstract

When needs and means become abstract in quality, abstraction is also a character of the reciprocal relation of individuals to oneanother. This abstract character, universality, is the character of being recognized and is the moment which makes concrete, i.e. social, the isolated and abstract needs and their ways and means of satisfaction.

Two contrasting attitudes: non-math person: "Math is so abstract." i.e. "hard to understand" math person: We abstract *in order to understand.* Part of our job is to teach people this latter mentality.

Abstract painting is abstract. It confronts you. There was a reviewer a while back who wrote that my pictures didn't have any beginning or any end. He didn't mean it as a compliment, but it was.

The 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.

What interests me is all the stuff that goes into abstract and abstract-figurative art. Not the styles, but the stuff that, in various combinations, make the styles: mixing and matching painting methods and ideas.

Abstract means literally to draw from or separate. In this sense every artist is abstract for he must create his own work from his visual impressions. A realistic or non-objective approach makes no difference. The result is what counts.

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.

To realize life in the abstract as noble or beautiful or humane, to set it forth so with radiance upon it, that is civilization in the arts. Shakespeare is the chief modern example of this supreme faculty of mankind.

When the most abstract and "useless" disciplines have been cultivated for a time, they are often seized upon as practical tools by other departments of science. I conceive that this is no accident, as if one bought a top hat for a wedding, and discovered later when a fire broke out, that it could be used as a water bucket.

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

The abstract, especially in those rough sketches, is very important to me, perhaps because of my advertising background, where layout is so important. Sometimes those first few lines cut the paper into such satisfying shapes that I don't want to go on, but I always do, adding nostrils and nipples and bootstraps until I have filled the paper up as usual.

To one given to day-dreaming, and fond of losing himself in reveries, a sea-voyage is full of subjects for meditation; but then they are the wonders of the deep and of the air, and rather tend to abstract the mind from worldly themes.

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

Small thoughts grow into a picture. It may suggest an individual or it may suggest a place, but generally the painting's job is to work that [idea] into an abstract proposition that is completely removed from the starting point.

Our ideas must agree with realities, be such realities concrete or abstract

We value the individual. We probably put too much emphasis on the individual, if it comes right down to it. How many people, in the abstract, would...let's say Paige....how many people would she sacrifice to keep Andy alive? The answer wouldn't make any sense if you were looking at the whole of humanity as equals.

At first the difference will be in whatever atmosphere I bring into it. It's not going to be like, 'I really want to do The Daily Show and I'd love to turn it into an abstract musical.' I like the format and the chance to satirize the news.

We value apology in the abstract, but turn our backs on it in practice.

I hate crowds and making speeches. I hate facing cameras and having to answer to a crossfire of questions. Why popular fancy should seize upon me, a scientist, dealing in abstract things and happy if left alone, is a manifestation of mass psychology that is beyond me.

Ordinary language is totally unsuited for expressing what physics really asserts, since the words of everyday life are not sufficiently abstract. Only mathematics and mathematical logic can say as little as the physicist means to say.

I've always said that I expected to grow up and get married like any nice southern girl, but the fact is you don't get married in the abstract. You find someone that you'd like to be married to.

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

Music is the most abstract of the arts and also the most physical....music is under two signs, the stars and the wine

The purely abstract theorist runs the risk that, as with modern decor, the furniture of the mind will be sparse, bare, and uncomfortable.

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.

I understand abstract art as an attempt to feed imagination with a world built through the basic sensations of the eyes.

Our impartiality is kept for abstract merit and demerit, which none of us ever saw.

These 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.

I paint like an abstract painter everything is inside nothing is meant to be, I take tattoos off a people I take anything that's not necessarily going to be timeless. I want to get across what I feel and I just use the figure because I enjoy the figure.

Not only the individual experience slowly acquired, but the accumulated experience of the race, organized in language, condensed in instruments and axioms, and in what may be called the inherited intuitions--these form the multiple unity which is expressed in the abstract term "experience.

I always say that writing non-fiction versus writing fiction is a bit like architecture versus abstract painting.

I think that if you can turn off the mind and look only with the eyes, ultimately everything becomes abstract.

An immoderate fondness for dress, for pleasure, and for sway, are the passions of savages; the passions that occupy those uncivilized beings who have not yet extended the dominion of the mind, or even learned to think with the energy necessary to concatenate that abstract train of thought which produces principles.... that women from their education and the present state of civilized life, are in the same condition, cannotbe controverted.

It is impossible not to feel stirred at the thought of the emotions of man at certain historic moments of adventure and discovery - Columbus when he first saw the Western shore, Pizarro when he stared at the Pacific Ocean, Franklin when the electric spark came from the string of his kite, Galileo when he first turned his telescope to the heavens. Such moments are also granted to students in the abstract regions of thought, and high among them must be placed the morning when Descartes lay in bed and invented the method of co-ordinate geometry.

Philosophers tend to radically underestimate the distance between abstract principles (such as "reduce suffering") and what it might actually mean for people to act on them.

My notion's to think of the human beings first and let the abstract ideas take care of themselves.

In the civil society, the individual is recognized and accepted as more than an abstract statistic or faceless member of some group; rather, he is a unique, spiritual being with a soul and a conscience.

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 loved surrealism and abstract painting, and anything related to those. I always thought painting was the highest form of art. What led me to drawing was seeing so much self-important, pretentious, conceptual-type art in university. I wanted to reject that by making quick, fun art.

Pictures, abstract symbols, materials, and colors are among the ingredients with which a designer or engineer works. To design is to discover relationships and to make arrangements and rearrangements among these ingredients.

I am not comfortable with abstract writing, stories that look like essays: you have to see, I need to see.

I grew up in a suburb of Baltimore with an extremely high concentration of Jewish families - where the Levys and Cohens in the high school yearbook went on for pages, where I could count far more temples than I ever could churches. Anti-Semitism, in our cultural biodome, was mostly an abstract concept.

When I make films I'm very intuitive; I'm instinctive. When you are shooting there's little time to think about abstract ideas, it's about getting things done, getting them right, and trying to channel the energies and get the best of whatever you have on your set. It's only once the film is finished that it's like, "Okay, let's try to figure out what happened." Try to figure out exactly what I did.

The inner and outer, the visible and invisible, the abstract and concrete - you've got to get the balance right (not that I do, but it's something to aim for).

Pop is everything art hasn't been for the last two decades...It springs newborn out of a boredom with the finality and over-saturation of Abstract-Expressionism, which, by its own esthetic logic, is the END of art, the glorious pinnacle of the long pyramidal creative process. Stifled by this rarefied atmosphere, some young painters turn back to some less exalted things like Coca-Cola, ice-cream sodas, big hamburgers, super-markets and 'EAT' signs. They are eye-hungry; they pop.

My father was a proctologist and my mother was an abstract artist, so that's how I view the world.

Lenelle Moïse's poems render the abstract - policy, disaster, history, diaspora - specific. Her words make the political not just personal, but corporeal: the beautiful system of the human body as canvas and subject, perfect in all its attendant complications and complexity, and still ruled, undeniably, by a warm, beating heart.

Sanctuary cities are a lot like hitchhiking. And the abstract, it feels really good until you feel dead.