Abstract Quotes - Page 23

• Music is at once the most wonderful, the most alive of all the arts- it is the most abstract, the most perfect, the most pure- and the most sensual. I listen with my body and it is my body that aches in response to the passion and pathos embodied in this music.

  Susan Sontag

  Art, Passion, Perfect

  Susan Sontag (2009). “Reborn: Journals and Notebooks, 1947-1963”, p.10, Macmillan

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• Heartbreak is our indication of sincerity: in a love relationship, in a work, in trying to learn a musical instrument, in the attempt to shape a better more generous self. Heartbreak is the beautifully helpless side of love and affection and is just as much an essence and emblem of care as the spiritual athlete's quick but abstract ability to let go... But heartbreak may be the very essence of being human, of being on the journey from here to there, and of coming to care deeply for what we find along the way.

  David Whyte

  Letting Go, Spiritual, Athlete

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• To take the choice of another ... to forget their concrete reality, to abstract them, to forget that you are a node in a matrix, that actions have consequences. We must not take the choice of another being. What is community but a means to ... for all we individuals to have ... our choices.

  China Mieville

  Mean, Reality, Actions Have Consequences

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• Everything abstract is ultimately part of the concrete. Everything inanimate finally serves the living. That is why every activity dealing in abstraction stands in ultimate service to a living whole.

  Edith Stein

  Unity, Concrete, Whole

  Edith Stein (2012). “Edith Stein Essays on Woman”, p.11, ICS Publications

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• Being a father ... I can't help feeling that, by comparison with being a mother, being a father is a rather abstract business.

  J. M. Coetzee

  Mother, Father, Feelings

  J. M. Coetzee (1999). “Disgrâce”, Random House (UK)

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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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• Some physicists describe gravity in terms of ten dimensions all curled up. But those aren't real words-just placeholders, used to refer to parts of abstract equations.

  Scott Adams

  Real, Science, Dimensions

  Scott Adams (2004). “God's Debris: A Thought Experiment”, p.20, Andrews McMeel Publishing

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• The essence of capitalism is expressed in two of its basic features: a) profit maximization and b) market competition. In their abstract formulations none of them was supposed to have anything conspiratorial against the poor. But in real life they turn out to be the "killers" of the poor - by making rich the richer and poor the poorer.

  Muhammad Yunus

  Real, Essence, Two

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• This is the universal property of the human mind. Abstract rules form the core of everything from computer programs to grammars. Our results show that babies' minds are built to look for such rules - even without being told.

  Gary Marcus

  Baby, Mind, Looks

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• It's all about this abstract entity called the story. It's all about the best way to tell the story, and to make a movie about the issues that this story is about. Filmmaking is storytelling, for me.

  Jose Padilha

  Issues, Stories, Way

  Source: collider.com

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• As the places where Americans dwell become evermore depressing and impossible, Disneyworld is where they escape to worship the nation in the abstract, a cartoon capital of a cartoon republic enshrining the falsehoods, half-truths, and delusions that prop up the squishy thing the national character has become--for instance, that we are a nation of families; that we care about our fellow citizens; that history matters; that there is a place called home.

  James Howard Kunstler

  Depressing, Home, Character

  James Howard Kunstler (1993). “The geography of nowhere: the rise and decline of America's man-made landscape”

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• Maybe stalking the woods is as vital to the human condition as playing music or putting words to paper. Maybe hunting has as much of a claim on our civilized selves as anything else. After all, the earliest forms of representational art reflect hunters and prey. While the arts were making us spiritually viable, hunting did the heavy lifting of not only keeping us alive, but inspiring us. To abhor hunting is to hate the place from which you came, which is akin to hating yourself in some distant, abstract way.

  Steven Rinella

  Art, Hate, Hunting

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• Abstract truth is the eye of reason.

  Jean-Jacques Rousseau

  Truth, Eye, Reason

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• General abstract truth is the most precious of all blessings; without it, man is blind; it is the eye of reason.

  Jean-Jacques Rousseau

  Truth, Eye, Men

  Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1783). “The Confessions of J.J. Rousseau: With The Reveries of the Solitary Walker”

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• He who talks much about virtue in the abstract, begins to be suspected; it is shrewdly guessed that where there is great preaching there will be little almsgiving.

  Thomas Carlyle

  Littles, Virtue, Almsgiving

  Thomas Carlyle (1881). “Critical and Miscellaneous Essays: Collected and Republished”, p.7

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• Good-nature is that benevolent and amiable temper of mind which disposes us to feel the misfortunes and enjoy the happiness of others, and, consequently, pushes us on to promote the latter and prevent the former; and that without any abstract contemplation on the beauty of virtue, and without the allurements or terrors of religion.

  Henry Fielding

  Mind, Virtue, Contemplation

  Henry Fielding, Thomas Roscoe (1853). “The Works of Henry Fielding, Complete in One Volume”, p.645

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• fashion seems to exist for an abstract person who is not you or me.

  Elizabeth Bowen

  Fashion, Persons, Seems

  Elizabeth Bowen (1950). “Collected Impressions”

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• How many of the people I know - sons and daughters - have intricate abstract expressionist paintings of their mothers, created out of their own emotions, attitudes, hands. And how many have only Polaroid pictures of their fathers.

  Ellen Goodman

  Daughter, Mother, Attitude

  Ellen Goodman (1983). “At Large”, Fawcett Books

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• Food became, for dinner parties in the sixties, what abstract expressionism had been in the fifties.

  Nora Ephron

  Party, Dinner, Expressionism

  Nora Ephron (2011). “Wallflower at the Orgy”, p.7, Bantam

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• In civilized places idleness, once the prerequisite for abstract thought, poetry, religion, philosophy, and falling in love, has become a character flaw. In America we've managed to stamp it out almost completely, and few people under forty can remember a single moment of it, even in earliest childhood. The phrase 'spare time' has vanished from the land.

  Barbara Holland

  Falling In Love, Philosophy, Single Mom

  Barbara Holland (1999). “Wasn't the Grass Greener?: A Curmudgeon's Fond Memories”, Harcourt

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• It would not be easy even for an unbeliever, to find a better translation of the rule of virtue from the abstract into the concrete, than to endeavor so to live that Christ would approve our life.

  John Stuart Mill

  Christ, Virtue, Easy

  John Stuart Mill (1874). “Three Essays on Religion”, p.255, New York : H. Holt

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• I think it's important to recognize that you can't have 100 per cent security and also then have 100 per cent privacy and zero inconvenience.... In the abstract you can complain about Big Brother and how this is a potential program run amok, but when you actually look at the details then I think we've struck the right balance.

  Barack Obama

  Running, Brother, Zero

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• The only thing I collect is art. I collect it because I like looking at it. A lot of it is really personal stuff that my friends have made, paintings that my husband's mother made, and things that I bought. I buy abstract art on eBay, and I buy some outsider art on eBay, or what is called folk art, I buy a lot of. I have a lot of professional art work as well as more stuff my friends' kids make. To have a wall of art to look at, I feel really surrounded by love, because so much of the work is related to my friendships.

  Kathleen Hanna

  Mother, Art, Wall

  "Kathleen Hanna on buffalo chicken, Destiny's Child, and the sketchy things she did to McDonald's apple pies". Interview with Marah Eakin, www.avclub.com. February 10, 2015.

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• What interests me is all the stuff that goes into abstract and abstract-figurative art. Not the styles, but the stuff that, in various combinations, make the styles: mixing and matching painting methods and ideas.

  Ed Askew

  Art, Ideas, Style

  Interview with Christian Filardo, logger.believermag.com. November 27, 2013.

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• My bitterness is not an abstract substance, it is as solid as a Christmas cake; I can cut it in slices and hand it round and there is still plenty left, for tomorrow.

  Caitlin Thomas

  Cutting, Hands, Cake

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