Abstract Quotes - Page 14

• 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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• 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?”

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• Realism and Naturalism rely mostly on the eye of the flesh. Abstract, conceptual and surrealistic art rely mostly on the eye of the mind. Great works of art rely on the eye of contemplation, the eye of the spirit.

  Alex Grey

  Art, Eye, Mind

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• I grew up a faithful person. I never lost faith. I prayed every day all throughout my life. But at some point in life, my faith became fairly abstract. And I lost this belief that we have a personal relationship with Jesus Christ.

  Carly Fiorina

  Jesus, Faithful, Belief

  "Fox News Sunday" with Chris Wallace, www.foxnews.com. May 31, 2015.

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• 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.

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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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• 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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• The fact that astrology nevertheless yields valid results proves that it is not the apparent positions of the stars which work, but rather the times which are measured or determined by arbitrarily named stellar positions. Time thus proves to be a stream of energy filled with qualities and not, as our philosophy would have it, an abstract concept or precondition of knowledge.

  Carl Jung

  Stars, Philosophy, Astrology

  Carl Gustav Jung, Roderick Main (1997). “Jung on Synchronicity and the Paranormal”, p.79, Psychology Press

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• The Western approach to reality is mostly through theory, and theory begins by denying reality - to talk about reality, to go around reality, to catch anything that attracts our sense-intellect and abstract it away from reality itself. Thus philosophy begins by saying that the outside world is not a basic fact, that its existence can be doubted and that every proposition in which the reality of the outside world is affirmed is not an evident proposition but one that needs to be divided, dissected and analyzed. It is to stand consciously aside and try to square a circle.

  Bruce Lee

  Philosophy, Reality, Squares

  "Striking Thoughts: Bruce Lee's Wisdom for Daily Living". Book edited by John Little, pp. 15 - 16, 2000.

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• Community is another such phenomenon. Like electricity, it is profoundly lawful. Yet there remains something about it that is inherently mysterious, miraculous, unfathomable. Thus there is no adequate one-sentence definition of genuine community. Community is something more than the sum of its parts, its individual members. What is this "something more?" Even to begin to answer that, we enter a realm that is not so much abstract as almost mystical. It is a realm where words are never fully suitable and language itself falls short.

  M. Scott Peck

  Fall, Community, Answers

  M. Scott Peck (2010). “The Different Drum: Community Making and Peace”, p.60, Simon and Schuster

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• Critical (i.e., separating) methods apply only to the world-as-nature. It would be easier to break up a theme of Beethoven with dissecting knife or acid than to break up the soul by methods of abstract thought . Nature-knowledge and man-knowledge have neither ways nor aims in common.

  Oswald Spengler

  Men, Knives, Soul

  Oswald Spengler, Charles Francis Atkinson (1932). “The Decline of the West”

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• 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

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• 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

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• 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".

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• 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

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• 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

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• Even an abstract form has to have a likeness.

  Willem de Kooning

  Form, Abstraction

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

  Robert Breault

  Art, Eye, Reality

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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, Abstraction

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

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• 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

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• 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.

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• 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

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• 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

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

  Georges Clemenceau

  Coffee, Capacity

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

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• What feminism calls patriarchy is simply civilization , an abstract system designed by men but augmented and now co-owned by women.

  Camille Paglia

  Men, Civilization, Feminism

  Camille Paglia (2011). “Vamps & Tramps: New Essays”, p.26, Vintage

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