Abstract Quotes - Page 28

• I have always seen life personally; my interest or sympathy or indignation is not aroused by an abstract cause but by the plight of a single person...Out of my response to an individual develops an awareness of a problem to the community, then to the country, then to the world.

  Eleanor Roosevelt

  Country, Community, Causes

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• One should not search for an abstract meaning of life ... Life can be made meaningful in a threefold way: first, through what we give to life ... second, by what we take from the world ... third, through the stand we take toward a fate we no longer can change.

  Viktor E. Frankl

  Meaningful, Fate, Giving

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• Science sometimes improves hypotheses and sometimes disproves them. But proof would be another matter and perhaps never occurs except in the realms of totally abstract tautology. We can sometimes say that if such and such abstract suppositions or postulates are given, then such and such abstract suppositions or postulates are given, then such and such must follow absolutely. But the truth about what can be perceived or arrived at by induction from perception is something else again.

  Gregory Bateson

  Perception, Would Be, Matter

  "Mind and Nature - a Necessary Unity". Book by Gregory Bateson, new edition, 1988.

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• I think you have to let go of this idea that you can be precious about everything, and let it be the abstract mess that it is.

  Ryan Reynolds

  Letting Go, Thinking, Ideas

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• Once we have taken the backward step to an abstract view of our whole system of beliefs, evidence, and justification, and seen that it works only, despite its pretensions, by taking the world largely for granted, we are not in a position to contrast all these appearances with an alternative reality. We cannot shed our ordinary responses, and if we could it would leave us with no means of conceiving a reality of any kind.

  Thomas Nagel

  Taken, Mean, Reality

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• By itself photography cannot deal with the unseen, the remote, the internal, the abstract, it does not speak of Man, only of a man ; not of Tree, only a tree.

  Neil Postman

  Photography, Men, Tree

  Neil Postman (2005). “Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business”, p.72, Penguin

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• The abstract kills, the concrete saves.

  Sylvia Plath

  Concrete

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

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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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• Delacroix, Wagner, Baudelaire - all great theorists, bent on dominating other minds by sensuous means. Their one dream was to create the irresistible effect - to intoxicate, or overwhelm. They looked to analysis to provide them with the keyboard on which to play, with certainty, on man's emotions, and they sought in abstract meditation they key to sure and certain action upon their subject - man's nervous and psychic being.

  Charles Baudelaire

  Dream, Mean, Men

  "Degas, Manet, Morisot". Book by Paul Valéry, 1989.

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• 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.

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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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• Can an idea a notion as abstract as Relativism produce by itself the effects alleged? cause all the harm, destroy all the lives and reputations? I am as far as anyone can be from denying the power of ideas in history, but the suggestion that a philosophy (as Relativism is often called) has perverted millions and debased daily life is on the face of it absurd. No idea working alone has ever demoralized society, and there have been plenty of ideas simpler and more exciting than Relativism.

  Jacques Barzun

  Philosophy, Ideas, Working Alone

  Jacques Barzun (1989). “The Culture We Deserve”, p.89, Wesleyan University Press

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• 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

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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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• I wore one of my Tanguy earrings and one made by Calder in order to show my impartiality between Surrealist and Abstract Art.

  Peggy Guggenheim

  Art, Order, Made

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• Art has to be incredibly layered. Symbols, signifiers... layers that relate. Combine signifiers with more abstract notions. Push! Vary lines.

  Kay WalkingStick

  Art, Lines, Layers

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• But no one, when you stop to think, has ever equated abstract expressionism as a movement with jazz music. It's based on improvisation. The rhythms, the personal involvement, all of this is part of the jazz experience.

  Romare Bearden

  Thinking, Movement, Jazz

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• The shapes we are creating are not abstract, they are absolute. They are released from any already existant thing in nature and their content lies in themselves.

  Naum Gabo

  Nature, Lying, Creating

  Naum Gabo (2000). “Gabo on Gabo: Texts and Interviews”

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• 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

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