Abstract Quotes - Page 10

• Algebraic geometry seems to have acquired the reputation of being esoteric, exclusive, and very abstract, with adherents who are secretly plotting to take over all the rest of mathematics. In one respect this last point is accurate.

  David Mumford

  Math, Lasts, Esoteric

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• Language [can] be expressed . . . by movements of the hands and face just as well as by the small, sound-generating movements of the throat and mouth. Then the first criterion for language that I had learned as a student—it is spoken and heard—was wrong; and, more important, language did not depend on our ability to speak and hear but must be a more abstract capacity of the brain. It was the brain that had language, and if that capacity was blocked in one channel, it would emerge through another.

  Harlan Lane

  Hands, Brain, Important

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• Abstract thinking leads to greater creativity... But in our businesses and our lives, we often do the opposite. We intensify our focus rather than widen our view.

  Daniel H. Pink

  Creativity, Thinking, Views

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• [Photography] puts a human face on issues which, from afar, can appear abstract or ideological or monumental in their global impact.

  James Nachtwey

  Photography, Motivation, Inspiration

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• I am convinced that abstract form, imagery, color, texture, and material convey meaning equal to or greater than words.

  Katherine McCoy

  Color, Texture, Form

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• When a person you love dies, it doesn’t feel real. It’s like it’s happening to someone else. It’s someone else’s life. I’ve never been good with the abstract. What does it mean when someone is really truly gone?

  Jenny Han

  Real, Mean, Doe

  Jenny Han (2011). “It's Not Summer Without You”, p.2, Simon and Schuster

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• Joy Rains has a gift. A gift for explaining abstract concepts like meditation through clever analogies and metaphors. FOR THE FIRST TIME in my hectic, harried life I actually UNDERSTAND how meditation is supposed to work and WHY I should give it a TRY!

  Elisabeth Leamy

  Clever, Rain, Giving

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• The one object of fifty years of abstract art is to present art-as-art and as nothing else, to make it into the one thing it is only, separating and defining it more and more, making it purer and emptier, more absolute and more exclusive - non-objective, non-representational, non-figurative, non-imagist, non-expressionist, non-subjective. the only and one way to say what abstract art or art-as-art is, is to say what it is not.

  Ad Reinhardt

  Art, Years, Fifty

  Ad Reinhardt, Barbara Rose (1991). “Art-as-art: The Selected Writings of Ad Reinhardt”, p.53, Univ of California Press

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• I am dominated by one thing, an irresistible, burning attraction towards the abstract. The expression of human feelings and the passions of man certainly interest me deeply, but I am less concerned with expressing the motions of the soul and mind than to render visible, so to speak, the inner flashes of intuition which have something divine in their apparent insignificance and reveal magic, even divine horizons, when they are transposed into the marvellous effects of pure plastic art.

  Gustave Moreau

  Art, Passion, Men

  "Gustave Moreau". Book by Jean Paladilhe and Josbe Pierrep, translated by Bettina Wadia, p. 32, 1972.

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• A man's knowledge may be said to be mature, in other words, when it has reached the most complete state of perfection to which he, as an individual, is capable of bringing it, when an exact correspondence is established between the whole of his abstract ideas and the things he has actually perceived for himself. His will mean that each of his abstract ideas rests, directly or indirectly, upon a basis of observation, which alone endows it with any real value; and also that he is able to place every observation he makes under the right abstract idea which belongs to it.

  Arthur Schopenhauer

  Real, Mean, Men

  Arthur Schopenhauer (2012). “Collected Essays of Arthur Schopenhauer”, p.256, Simon and Schuster

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• An old essay by John Updike begins, 'We live in an era of gratuitous inventions and negative improvements.' That language is general and abstract, near the top of the ladder. It provokes our thinking, but what concrete evidence leads Updike to his conclusion ? The answer is in his second sentence : 'Consider the beer can.' To be even more specific, Updike was complaining that the invention of the pop-top ruined the aesthetic experience of drinking beer. 'Pop-top' and 'beer' are at the bottom of the ladder, 'aesthetic experience' at the top.

  John Updike

  Drinking, Beer, Thinking

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• But there's a fourth interpretation: Obama can't leave his comfort zone. No president since Woodrow Wilson has been as enamored of abstract ideas or more sure that disagreement with him is proof of ignorance, bad faith or dogmatism. As a candidate, he insisted his real opponent was 'cynicism,' and in his address last week, he returned to this trite formulation, insisting again he was bravely battling the cynics.

  Jonah Goldberg

  Real, Ignorance, Ideas

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• We must cultivate and defend particularity, individuality, and irregularity-life. Human beings do not have a future in the collectivism of bureaucratic states or in the mass society created by capitalism. Every system, by virtue as much of its abstract nature as of its pretension to totality, is the enemy of life. As a forgotten Spanish poet, José Moreno Villa, put it with melancholy wit: "I have discovered in symmetry the root of much iniquity."

  Octavio Paz

  Life, Roots, Individuality

  Octavio Paz (1987). “1904-1912”, San Diego : Harcourt Brace Jovanovich

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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 Dumas

  Inspiring, Art, Reality

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• True Christianity is not merely believing a certain set of dry abstract propositions: it is to live in daily personal communication with an actual living person - Jesus Christ.

  J. C. Ryle

  Jesus, Believe, Communication

  J.C Ryle, Rev Terry Kulakowski, Editor “PRACTICAL RELIGION”, Lulu.com

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• Black and white is a very minimalist art form and unlike color photographs does not pretend to mimic the world in a manner similar to the way the human eye might perceive...
  
  Black and white is essentially an abstract way to interpret and transform what one might refer to as reality.

  Roger Ballen

  Art, Eye, Black And White

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• Like Aristotle, conservatives generally accept the world as it is; they distrust the politics of abstract reason – that is, reason divorced from experience.

  Benjamin Wiker

  World, Reason, Accepting

  Benjamin Wiker (2010). “10 Books Every Conservative Must Read: Plus Four Not to Miss and One Impostor”, p.14, Regnery Publishing

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• I have been continuously aware that in painting, I am always dealing with... a relational structure. Which in turn makes permission 'to be abstract' no problem at all.

  Robert Motherwell

  Painting, Problem, Structure

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• I began to realize that an intuitive understanding and consciousness was more significant than abstract thinking and intellectual logical analysis. Intuition is a very powerful thing, more powerful than intellect, in my opinion. That's had a big impact on my work.

  Steve Jobs

  Powerful, Thinking, Impact

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• The kind of painting which I find exciting is not necessarily representational or non-representational, but it is musical and architectural... Whether this visual relationship is slightly more or slightly less abstract is, for me, beside the point.

  Ben Nicholson

  Musical, Painting, Kind

  Peter Khoroche, Ben Nicholson (2002). “Ben Nicholson: drawings and painted reliefs”, Lund Humphries Publishers

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• Can an idea a notion as abstract as Relativism produce by itself the effects alleged? cause all the harm, destroy all the lives and reputations? I am as far as anyone can be from denying the power of ideas in history, but the suggestion that a philosophy (as Relativism is often called) has perverted millions and debased daily life is on the face of it absurd. No idea working alone has ever demoralized society, and there have been plenty of ideas simpler and more exciting than Relativism.

  Jacques Barzun

  Philosophy, Ideas, Working Alone

  Jacques Barzun (1989). “The Culture We Deserve”, p.89, Wesleyan University Press

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• Delacroix, Wagner, Baudelaire - all great theorists, bent on dominating other minds by sensuous means. Their one dream was to create the irresistible effect - to intoxicate, or overwhelm. They looked to analysis to provide them with the keyboard on which to play, with certainty, on man's emotions, and they sought in abstract meditation they key to sure and certain action upon their subject - man's nervous and psychic being.

  Charles Baudelaire

  Dream, Mean, Men

  "Degas, Manet, Morisot". Book by Paul Valéry, 1989.

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• Artists with a capital 'A' are at ease working in all areas of art, whether it is a contemporary abstract painting or work requiring methods and techniques of the Renaissance Masters.

  Igor Babailov

  Art, Technique, Abstract Painting

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• I don't like [to] make a woman ... an abstract concept of the fashion. I don't like [to] say, "You must wear that." ... I am not a dictator.

  Yves Saint Laurent

  Fashion, Dictator, Concepts

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• I often told the fanatics of realism that there is no such thing as realism in art: it only exists in the mind of the observer. Art is a symbol, a thing conjuring up reality in our mental image. That is why I don't see any contradiction between abstract and figurative art either.

  Antoni Tapies

  Art, Reality, Mind

  "Tàpies, Werke auf Papier 1943 - 2003" by Antoni Tapies, Kunsthalle Emden, edited by Achim Sommer, Altana, (p. 25), 2004.

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