Abstract Quotes - Page 18

• People like the idea of innovation in the abstract, but when you present them with any specific innovation, they tend to reject it because it doesn't fit with what they already know.

  Jessica Livingston

  Ideas, People, Innovation

  Jessica Livingston (2008). “Founders at Work: Stories of Startups' Early Days”, p.17, Apress

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• Information doesn’t deserve to be free. It is an abstract tool; a useful
  fantasy, a nothing. It is nonexistent until and unless a person experiences
  it in a useful way.

  Jaron Lanier

  Tools, Information, Way

  "A Q&A with Author Jaron Lanier". Amazon Interview, www.amazon.com. January 2010.

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• 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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• We feel the beauty of nature because we are part of nature and because we know that however much in our separate domains we abstract from the unity of Nature, this unity remains. Although we may deal with particulars, we return finally to the whole pattern woven out of these.

  Ernest Everett Just

  Beauty, Nature, Knowing

  Ernest Everett Just (1939). “The Biology of the Cell Surface”, Taylor & Francis

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• Freedom is not merely a word or an abstract theory, but the most effective instrument for advancing the welfare of man.

  John F. Kennedy

  Men, Welfare, Theory

  Kennedy, John F. (1962). “Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: John F. Kennedy, 1961”, p.548, Best Books on

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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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• The southern German has the imagination and emotionality to subscribe to a fanatic ideology, but he is ordinarily inhibited from excesses by his natural humaneness. The Prussian does not have the imagination to conceive in terms of abstract racial and political theories, but when he is told to do something, he does it.

  Arthur Seyss-Inquart

  Imagination, Southern, Political

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• A mathematician is an individual who calls himself a 'physicist' and does 'physics' and physical experiments with abstract concepts.

  Bill Gaede

  Doe, Physics, Individual

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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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• Our relationship with places is a close bond, intricate in nature, and not abstract, not remote at all: It's enveloping, almost a continuum with all we are and think.

  Tony Hiss

  Thinking, Our Relationship, Continuum

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• In ordinary life, we are not aware of the unity of all things, but divide the world into separate objects and events. This division is useful and necessary to cope with our everyday environment, but it is not a fundamental feature of reality. It is an abstraction devised by our discriminating and categorising intellect. To believe that our abstract concepts of separate 'things' and 'events' are realities of nature is an illusion.

  Fritjof Capra

  Believe, Reality, Unity

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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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• The big shock of my life was Abstract Expressionism - Pollock, de Kooning, those guys. It changed my work. I was an academically trained student, and suddenly you could pour paint, smear it on, broom it on!

  LeRoy Neiman

  Guy, Students, Paint

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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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• But nobody is visually naive any longer. We are cluttered with images, and only abstract art can bring us to the threshold of the divine.

  Dominique de Menil

  Art, Divine, Threshold

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• Everybody enjoys the freedom he deserves, which is measured by the stature and dignity of his person or by his function, and not by the abstract and elementary fact of merely being a 'human being' or a 'citizen'.

  Julius Evola

  Citizens, Facts, Dignity

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• While it may be impossible to 'disprove' the existence of some 'Higher Power' or abstract Creator, it is entirely possible — through analysis and research — to find discrepancies within the ancient, organized religious traditions that support the idea of a specific God.

  David G. McAfee

  Religious, Ideas, Support

  FaceBook post by David G. McAfee from Dec 30, 2013

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• Passion isn't something that lives way up in the sky, in abstract dreams and hopes. It lives at ground level, in the specific details of what you're actually doing every day.

  Marcus Buckingham

  Dream, Passion, Sky

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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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• We think about the world in all ways we experience it ; we think visually, we think in sign, we think kinesthetically, we think in abstract term, we think in movement. Creativity is the process of having original ideas that have value.

  Ken Robinson

  Creativity, Thinking, Ideas

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