Abstract Quotes - Page 11

• The abstract kills, the concrete saves.

  Sylvia Plath

  Concrete

  Sylvia Plath (2013). “The Journals of Sylvia Plath”, p.287, Anchor

  12 Copy quote

  Show source

• The body should not just be something you see. It's also the inside of it. It's frightening and abstract and much more than pretty or not pretty. The shape of it is boring.

  Jenny Hval

  Body, Shapes, Boring

  "Jenny Hval's Soft Dick Rock". Interview with Jenn Pelly, pitchfork.com. June 15, 2015.

  6 Copy quote

  Show source

• 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

  6 Copy quote

• 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.

  52 Copy quote

  Show source

• 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

  12 Copy quote

  Show source

• Pot is great for the abstract, for when you don't have to be regimented and for when you don't need parameters. When you're creating a song, there should never be any parameters, so being high is okay because your mind can wander all over the place.

  Steve "Lips" Kudlow

  Song, Creating, Mind

  Source: www.huffingtonpost.com

  6 Copy quote

  Show source

• It is the fertile hallucination that makes paint so compelling. Paint is like the numerologist's numbers, always counting but never adding up, always speaking but never saying anything rational, always playing at being abstract but never leaving the clotted body.

  James Elkins

  Play, Numbers, Leaving

  James Elkins (2004). “What Painting Is”, p.49, Routledge

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• To abstract is to draw out the essence of a matter. To abstract in art is to separate certain fundamentals from irrelevant material which surrounds them.

  Ben Shahn

  Art, Essence, Matter

  Ben Shahn (1957). “The Shape of Content”, p.63, Harvard University Press

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• One of the most striking aspects of abstract art's appearance is her nakedness, an art stripped bare.

  Robert Motherwell

  Art, Appearance, Abstract Art

  "The Writings of Robert Motherwell".

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• Maybe I was a little jealous or envious of the abstract painters - but the truth was I thought what they were doing was boring.

  Larry Rivers

  Jealousy, Littles, Boring

  Larry Rivers, Marlborough Gallery (2005). “Larry Rivers: paintings and drawings: 1951-2001 ; May 3-June 4, 2005”, Marlborough Gallery

  46 Copy quote

  Show source

• Because of its concrete content, sense-certainty immediately appears as the richest kind of knowledge, indeed a knowledge of infinite wealth for which no bounds can be found, either when we reach out into space and time in which it is dispersed, or when we take a bit of this wealth, and by division enter into it. Moreover, sense-certainty appears to be the truest knowledge ... but, in the event, this very certainty proves itself to be the most abstract and poorest truth. All that it says about what it knows is just that it is; and its truth contains nothing but the sheer being of the thing.

  Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

  Space, Events, Division

  7 Copy quote

• Abstract art is a fundamental distrust of the theory of reality concocted by the eyes.

  Robert Breault

  Art, Eye, Reality

  9 Copy quote

• Philosophers are not honest enough in their work, although they make a lot of virtuous noise when the problem of truthfulness is touched even remotely. They all pose as if they had discovered and reached their real opinions through the self-development of a cold, pure, divinely unconcerned dialectic...; while at bottom it is an assumption, a hunch, indeed a kind of "inspiration" most often a desire of the heart that has been filtered and made abstract that they defend with reasons they have sought after the fact.

  Friedrich Nietzsche

  Real, Philosophy, Inspiration

  "Beyond Good and Evil". Book by Friedrich Nietzsche, Part One: On the Prejudices of Philosophers, §5., 1886.

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• 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, Abstraction

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

  18 Copy quote

  Show source

• Iconic clothing has been secularized. . . . A guardsman in a dress uniform is ostensibly an icon of aggression; his coat is red as the blood he hopes to shed. Seen on a coat-hanger, with no man inside it, the uniform loses all its blustering significance and, to the innocent eye seduced by decorative colour and tactile braid, it is as abstract in symbolic information as a parasol to an Eskimo. It becomes simply magnificent.

  Angela Carter

  Hope, Eye, Men

  Angela Carter (1998). “Shaking a Leg: Collected Writings”, Penguin Group USA

  64 Copy quote

  Show source

• I should describe mine own nature as tripartite, my interests consisting of three parallel and dissociated groups - (a) Love of the strange and fantastic. (b) Love of the abstract truth and of scientific logick. (c) Love of the ancient and the permanent. Sundry combinations of these three strains will probably account for all my odd tastes and eccentricities.

  H. P. Lovecraft

  Groups, Three, Taste

  Letter to Reinhardt Kleiner (7 March 1920), in "Selected Letters I, 1911-1924" edited by August Derleth and Donald Wandrei, (p. 110), 1964.

  51 Copy quote

  Show source

• Bourgeois society is ruled by equivalence. It makes the dissimilar comparable by reducing it to abstract quantities. To the enlightenment, that which does not reduce to numbers, and ultimately to the one, becomes illusion.

  Theodor Adorno

  Numbers, Enlightenment, Doe

  Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer (1997). “Dialectic of Enlightenment”, p.7, Verso

  9 Copy quote

  Show source

• Every three minutes a woman is being raped. Every eighteen seconds a woman is being beaten. There is nothing abstract about it. It is happening right now as I am speaking.

  Andrea Dworkin

  Three, Minutes, Happenings

  6 Copy quote

• Modern transcendental idealism, Emersonianism, for instance, also seems to let God evaporate into abstract Ideality. Not a deity in concreto, not a superhuman person, but the immanent divinity in things, the essentially spiritual structure of the universe, is the object of the transcendentalist cult. In that address of the graduating class at Divinity College in 1838 which made Emerson famous, the frank expression of this worship of mere abstract laws was what made the scandal of the performance.

  William James

  Letting Go, Spiritual, College

  "The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature". Book by William James, 1902.

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• They that examine into the Nature of Man, abstract from Art and Education, may observe, that what renders him a Sociable Animal, consists not in his desire of Company, Good-nature, Pity, Affability, and other Graces of a fair Outside; but that his vilest and most hateful Qualities are the most necessary Accomplishments to fit him for the largest, and, according to the World, the happiest and most flourishing Societies.

  Bernard de Mandeville

  Art, Animal, Men

  Bernard de Mandeville (1723). “The Fable of the Bees”, p.1, Jazzybee Verlag

  10 Copy quote

  Show source

• I'm interested in color belonging to something, where it takes on a completely new kind of vibrancy, rather than being what you would call straight abstract paintings. And anyway it is so much more exciting trying to find out about the three dimensions of color and sticking it down on a two dimensional surface.

  Euan Uglow

  Color, Two, Trying

  57 Copy quote

• Americans have no capacity for abstract thought, and make bad coffee.

  Georges Clemenceau

  Coffee, Capacity

  "The Europeans". Book by Luigi Barzini, p. 225, 1984.

  44 Copy quote

  Show source

• It is impossible to be completely abstract about clothes because they have no life unless they are worn. They must fit onto a body or they do not exist.

  Elizabeth Hawes

  Clothes, Body, Impossible

  Elizabeth Hawes (1942). “Why is a Dress?: Who? What? When? Where?”

  15 Copy quote

  Show source

• Acts which are essentially dishonourable must not be done; they would be justified only by calm contemplation of their correctness in abstract cases.

  Aleister Crowley

  Would Be, Done, Calm

  Aleister Crowley (1991). “Magick: In Theory and Practice”, Book Sales

  5 Copy quote

  Show source

• When I began as an artist, I already did not like expressionism, or abstract expressionism, because abstract painting had already been done. I did not want to belong to any one group or the other, and I'm not one or the other.

  Georg Baselitz

  Artist, Done, Painting

  4 Copy quote