Popular quotes about Abstraction! Wisdom and inspiration are here!
Before abstraction everything is one, but one like chaos; after abstraction everything is united again, but this union is a free binding of autonomous, self-determined beings. Out of a mob a society has developed, chaos has been transformed into a manifold world.
NovalisI think I'm just generally more interested in figuration than abstraction. I think that painting abstraction often feels like painting colors to me, whereas portraits always feel like something connected. I like the exchange, the collaborative aspect of sitter and subject for sure.
Hilton AlsMy message to the serious programmer is this: spend a part of your working day examining and refining your own methods. Even though programmers are always struggling to meet some future or past deadline, methodological abstraction is a wise long term investment.
Robert W. FloydI submit that tennis is the most beautiful sport there is, and also the most demanding....Basketball comes close, but it's a team sport and lacks tennis's primal mano a mano intensity. Boxing might come close- at least at the lighter weight divisions- but the actual physical damage the fighters inflict on each other makes it too concretely brutal to be really beautiful- a level of abstraction and formality (i.e., play) is necessary for a sport to possess true metaphysical beauty (in my opinion).
David Foster WallaceWhen truth is nothing but truth, it's unnatural, it's an abstraction that resembles nothing in the real world.
Aldous HuxleyThis new plastic idea will ignore the particulars of appearance, that is to say, natural form and colour. On the contrary it should find its expression in the abstraction of form and colour, that is to say, in the straight line and the clearly defined primary colour.
Piet MondrianAbstraction 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 GorkyThe economy is not an abstraction. The economy consists of people, and it will only grow if people feel secure and are reasonably free.
John BrutonTime isn't made of anything. It is an abstraction. Just a meaning that we impose upon motion.
Anne CarsonTo make someone an icon is to make him an abstraction, and abstractions are incapable of vital communication with living people.
David Foster WallaceWe lay down a fundamental principle of generalization by abstraction: The existence of analogies between central features of various theories implies the existence of a general theory which underlies the particular theories and unifies them with respect to those central features.
E. H. MooreEssential truth, the truth of the intellectualists, the truth with no one thinking it, is like the coat that fits tho no one has ever tried it on, like the music that no ear has listened to. It is less real, not more real, than the verified article; and to attribute a superior degree of glory to it seems little more than a piece of perverse abstraction-worship.
William JamesThe purpose of abstraction is not to be vague, but to create a new semantic level in which one can be absolutely precise.
Edsger DijkstraWhether dark presages of the night proceed from any latent power of the soul during her abstraction, or from any operation of subordinate spirits, has been a dispute.
Joseph AddisonIngres was one of those artists to whom the outline was something sacred and magical, and the reason is that it was the means of reconciling the major conflict in his art, the conflict between abstraction and sensibility.
Kenneth ClarkThere are ages in which the rational man and the intuitive man stand side by side, the one in fear of intuition, the other with scorn for abstraction. The latter is just as irrational as the former is inartistic.
Friedrich NietzscheI wouldn't say I'm a very technical [guitar] player. I'm more intuitive - it's always more about chasing an abstraction.
Annie E. ClarkThere's always a joy in newness as a painter, and in sub-Saharan Africa, I encountered different realities with regard to light and how it bounces across the skin. The way that blues and purples come into play. In India and Sri Lanka, it was no different. It became a moment in which I had an opportunity to learn as a painter how to create the body in full form, and that's a very material and aesthetic thing. This is not conceptual. It's all an abstraction.
Kehinde WileyAbstraction didn't have to be limited to a kind of rectilinear geometry or even a simple curve geometry. It could have a geometry that had a narrative impact. In other words, you could tell a story with the shapes. It wouldn't be a literal story, but the shapes and the interaction of the shapes and colors would give you a narrative sense. You could have a sense of an abstract piece flowing along and being part of an action or activity. That sort of turned me on.
Frank StellaThere is an amount of abstraction in my movies, and sometimes they don't really understand it until the film is finished.
Michel GondryA conscious decision to eliminate certain details and include selective bits of personal experiences or perceptual nuances, gives the painting more of a multi-dimension than when it is done directly as a visual recording. This results in a kind of abstraction... and thus avoids the pitfalls of mere decoration.
Wayne ThiebaudHome is where the heart is, we say, rubbing the flint of one abstraction against another.
Diane AckermanEverything 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.
Edith SteinIn a time when our nation is engaged in multiple, long-term wars, it's critical that "the military" not become an abstraction to the vast majority of Americans who are not participants.
James M StrockMen do not fight for flag or country, for the Marine Corps or glory or any other abstraction. They fight for one another. And if you came through this ordeal, you would age with dignity.
William ManchesterIf I see a human body on the stage, I don't see it as an abstraction. I see it as a body.
Antony Tudor