Abstract Quotes - Page 22

• 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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• 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.

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• No matter how much a young man likes to think for himself, he is always trying to model himself on some abstract pattern largely derived from the example of the world around him. And a man, no matter how conservative, shows his own worth by his personal deviation from that pattern.

  Cesare Pavese

  Men, Thinking, Always Trying

  Cesare Pavese, Alma Elizabeth Murch (1961). “This Business of Living”, p.131, Transaction Publishers

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• 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

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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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• Not but wut abstract war is horrid, I sign to thet with all my heart, But civilysation doos git forrid Sometimes, upon a powder-cart.

  James Russell Lowell

  War, Heart, Sometimes

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• Money-crimes have an abstract quality. History is laden with the victims of gold, but their remains are odourless.

  Georges Bernanos

  Quality, Gold, Crime

  "A Diary of My Times". Book by Georges Bernanos, 1938.

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• I must confess that I and a few others are burdened with heavy responsibilities regarding the future of criticism. I am certainly, if not the inventor, then at least one of the first systematizers of an absurd critical practice that, as soon as it had peeked its beak out of the nest, flapping its new wet wings, took flight in the minds of the young, becoming a wild ox and sowing avant-garde literature with the mighty tomes of what might as well be called the abstract bear.

  Louis Aragon

  Responsibility, Practice, Wings

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• A tendency toward the abstract is inherent in linear expression: graphic imagery being confined to outlines has a fairy-like quality and at the same time can achieve great precision.

  Paul Klee

  Expression, Quality, Fairy

  Paul Klee (1969). “Paul Klee: Watercolors, Drawings, Writings”

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• The corporeal element in man is a large screen and partition that prevents him from perfectly perceiving abstract ideals; this would be the case even if the corporeal element were as pure and superior as the substance of the spheres ; how much more must this be the case with our dark and opaque body. However great the exertion of our mind may be to comprehend the Divine Being or any of the ideals, we find a screen and partition between God and us.

  Maimonides

  Dark, Men, Mind

  Moses Maimonides (2012). “The Guide for the Perplexed”, p.264, Courier Corporation

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• There is no such thing as abstract art, or else all art is abstract, which amounts to the same thing. Abstract art no more exists than does curved art yellow art or green art.

  Jean Dubuffet

  Art, Yellow, Doe

  "Prospectus et tous écrits suivants", Vol. II, by Jean Dubuffet, Gallimard, Paris, (p. 206), 1967.

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• Abstract art as it is conceived at present is a game bequeathed to painting and sculpture by art history. One who accepts its premises must consent to limit his imagination to a depressing casuistry regarding the formal requirements of modernism.

  Harold Rosenberg

  Depressing, Art, Games

  Harold Rosenberg (1983). “Art on the Edge: Creators and Situations”, p.71, University of Chicago Press

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• At the classical origins of philosophic thought, the transcending concepts remained committed to the prevailing separation between intellectual and manual labor to the established society of enslavement. ... Those who bore the brunt of the untrue reality and who, therefore, seemed to be most in need of attaining its subversion were not the concern of philosophy. It abstracted from them and continued to abstract from them.

  Herbert Marcuse

  Philosophy, Reality, Intellectual

  "One-Dimensional Man" by Herbert Marcuse, (p. 134-135), 1964.

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• Mark Tobey fills his canvases with elliptical, calligraphic lines, beautiful whirls that seem at first glance to be completely abstract and to come from nowhere at all except his own subjective musing. But I shall never forget how struck I was, on visiting Tobey's studio one day, to see strewn around books on astronomy and photographs of the Milky Way. I knew then that Tobey experiences the movement of the stars and solar constellations as the external pole of his encounter.

  Rollo May

  Beautiful, Stars, Book

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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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• The complexity of software is an essential property, not an accidental one. Hence, descriptions of a software entity that abstract away its complexity often abstracts away its essence.

  Fred Brooks

  Essence, Essentials, Description

  "No Silver Bullet". Book by Fred Brooks, 1986.

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• Painting for me is like a fabric, all of a piece and uniform, with one set of threads as the representational, esthetic element, and the cross-threads as the technical, architectural, or abstract element. These threads are interdependent and complementary, and if one set is lacking the fabric does not exist. A picture with no representational purpose is to my mind always an incomplete technical exercise, for the only purpose of any picture is to achieve representation.

  Juan Gris

  Exercise, Mind, Doe

  "On the Possibilities of Painting". Lecture, Sorbonne, May 15, 1924.

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• A right , in the abstract, is a fact ; it is not a thing to be given, established, or conferred; it is. Of the exercise of a right power may deprive me; of the right itself, never.

  Voltairine de Cleyre

  Exercise, Power, May

  Voltairine de Cleyre (2012). “Exquisite Rebel: The Essays of Voltairine de Cleyre -- Anarchist, Feminist, Genius”, p.171, SUNY Press

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• There was something about the self-confession and self-confusion of Abstract expressionism - as though the man and the work were the same - that personally always put me off because at that time my focus was in the opposite direction.

  Robert Rauschenberg

  Men, Self, Opposites

  "Robert Rauschenberg, Works, Writings and Interviews". Book by Sam Hunter (p. 37), 2006.

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• My blessed California, you are so wise. You render death abstract, efficient, clean. Your afterlife is only real estate, And in his kingdom Death must stay unseen.

  Dana Gioia

  Wise, Real, Blessed

  Dana Gioia (2016). “99 Poems: New & Selected”, p.49, Macmillan

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• That's all very well as an abstract moral principle, Avril, a coffee-table theoretical construct, but there's no denying the sheer gratuitous pleasure to be derived from seeing members of the ruling class in pain and torment.

  Irvine Welsh

  Pain, Coffee, Class

  Irvine Welsh (1995). “The Acid House”, p.269, W. W. Norton & Company

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• Blaming TV as an abstract entity is nonsensical. It's our hand on the remote. There's a world out there outside the tube.

  Carlos Ruiz Zafon

  Hands, Television, World

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• The movement of abstract art... bears within itself at almost every point the mark of the changing material and psychological conditions surrounding modern culture.

  Meyer Schapiro

  Art, Culture, Movement

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• Nature and abstract forms are both materials for art, and the choice of one or the other flows from historically changing interests.

  Meyer Schapiro

  Art, Choices, Flow

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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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