Abstraction Quotes - Page 2

• All painting - the painting of the past as well as of the present - shows us that its essential plastic means were only line and color.

  Piet Mondrian

  Art, Mean, Past

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• And silence. She liked the silence most of all. The silence in which the body, senses, the instincts, are more alert, more powerful, more sensitized, live a more richly perfumed and intoxication life, instead of transmuting into thoughts, words, into exquisite abstractions, mathematics of emotion in place of violent impact, the volcanic eruptions of fever, lust and delight.

  Anais Nin

  Powerful, Impact, Silence

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• Conversation opens our views, and gives our faculties a more vigorous play; it puts us upon turning our notions on every side, and holds them up to a light that discovers those latent flaws which would probably have lain concealed in the gloom of unagitated abstraction.

  William Melmoth

  Views, Play, Light

  William Melmoth (1805). “Fitzosborne's Letters on several subjects ... Eleventh edition, with the Dialogue on Oratory [translated from Tacitus]: to which is prefixed a life of the author”, p.191

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• On the dogmas of religion, as distinguished from moral principles, all mankind, from the beginning of the world to this day, have been quarrelling, fighting, burning and torturing one another, for abstractions unintelligible to themselves and to all others, and absolutely beyond the comprehension of the human mind.

  Thomas Jefferson

  Religious, Fighting, Faith Religion

  Thomas Jefferson (2010). “The Works of Thomas Jefferson: Correspondence and Papers, 1816-1826”, p.42, Cosimo, Inc.

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• I consider my work non-objective and I think abstract is an abstraction of something, like a landscape. Abstraction means something is abstracted. It relates to something. Non-objective relates to nothing. It has no object.

  Pat Steir

  Mean, Thinking, Landscape

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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• If chimpanzees have consciousness, if they are capable of abstractions, do they not have what until now has been described as 'human rights'? How smart does a chimp have to be before killing him constitutes murder?

  Carl Sagan

  Smart, Animal, Rights

  Carl Sagan (2012). “Dragons of Eden: Speculations on the Evolution of Human Intelligence”, p.126, Ballantine Books

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• The only and one way to say what abstract art or art-as-art is, is to say what it is not.

  Ad Reinhardt

  Way, Abstract

  "Art-as-art: The Selected Writings of Ad Reinhardt".

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• In every landscape should reside jewels of abstract art waiting to be discovered.

  Melissa Brown

  Art, Jewels, Waiting

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• All art is an abstraction to some degree.

  Henry Moore

  Art, Degrees, Art Is

  Henry Moore (2013). “On Being a Sculptor”, p.20, Tate Enterprises Ltd

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• To make abstractions hold in reality is to destroy reality.

  Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

  Reality

  "Lectures on the Philosophy of History, Volume 1". Book by Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, 1832.

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• Art, indeed, began with abstraction.

  Sigfried Giedion

  Art

  Sigfried Giedion (1962). “The Eternal Present: The beginnings of art”, [New York

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• Reflective abstraction, however, is based not on individual actions but on coordinated actions.

  Jean Piaget

  Action, Individual

  Richard Isadore Evans, Jean Piaget (1973). “Dialogue with Jean Piaget”, Praeger Publishers

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• It is terrible to destroy a person's picture of himself in the interests of truth or some other abstraction.

  Doris Lessing

  Inspirational, Truth, Terrible

  Doris Lessing (1973). “The Grass is Singing”, p.52, Heinemann

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

  Stephen Dunn

  Abstract, Ache

  Stephen Dunn (1990). “Between Angels”, p.142, W. W. Norton & Company

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• Historically and politically, the petit-bourgeois is the key to the century. The bourgeois and proletariat classes have become abstractions: the petite-bourgeoisie, in contrast, is everywhere, you can see it everywhere, even in the areas of the bourgeois and the proletariat, what's left of them.

  Roland Barthes

  Keys, Class, Bourgeoisie

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• Time isn't made of anything. It is an abstraction. Just a meaning that we impose upon motion.

  Anne Carson

  Time, Made

  Anne Carson (1999). “Autobiography of Red: A Novel in Verse”, Vintage

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• The notion of a separate organism is clearly an abstraction, as is also its boundary. Underlying all this is unbroken wholeness even though our civilization has developed in such a way as to strongly emphasize the separation into parts.

  David Bohm

  Civilization, Unbroken, Way

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• I'm really interested in the nondefinitive element of abstraction.

  Julie Mehretu

  Elements

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• I hardly need to abstract things, for each object is unreal enough already, so unreal that I can only make it real by means of painting.

  Max Beckmann

  Real, Mean, Enough Already

  Max Beckmann (2013). “On My Painting - Max Beckmann”, p.8, Tate Enterprises Ltd

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• We must be careful not to confuse data with the abstractions we use to analyse them.

  William James

  Powerful, Science, Data

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• Philosophers stretch the meaning of words until they retain scarcely anything of their original sense. They give the name of "God" to some vague abstraction which they have created for themselves; having done so they can pose before all the world as deists, as believers of God, and they can even boast that they have recognized a higher, purer concept of God, notwithstanding that their God is not nothing more than an insubstantial shadow and no longer the mighty personality of religious doctrines.

  Sigmund Freud

  Religious, Names, Giving

  Sigmund Freud, Scientific Literature Corporation (1961). “The standard edition of the complete psychological works of Sigmund Freud”

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• In the end, therefore, money will be the one thing people will desire, which is moreover only representative, an abstraction. Nowadays a young man hardly envies anyone his gifts, his art, the love of a beautiful girl, or his fame; he only envies him his money. Give me money, he will say, and I am saved...He would die with nothing to reproach himself with, and under the impression that if only he had had the money he might really have lived and might even have achieved something great.

  Soren Kierkegaard

  Beautiful, Girl, Art

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• Where jargon turns living issues into abstractions, and where jargon ends by competing with jargon, people don't have causes. They only have enemies.

  V. S. Naipaul

  Issues, People, Enemy

  V. S. Naipaul (2012). “Literary Occasions: Essays”, p.201, Pan Macmillan

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• Arabs are a complete abstraction in the propaganda world and all the death and destruction is completely unreal to Americans.

  Aleksandar Hemon

  World, Propaganda, Destruction

  "There Is No Real Life". Interview with Brad Fox, www.guernicamag.com. March 15, 2013.

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

  Jean Helion

  Art, Eye, Imagination

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