Abstract Quotes - Page 30

• When you write, you don't have the social constraints of having people in front of you, so you talk about abstract matters.

  Nassim Nicholas Taleb

  Writing, People, Matter

  "Nassim Taleb: my rules for life" by Carole Cadwalladr, www.theguardian.com. November 24, 2012.

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• I was an art history major, but never specifically contemporary. I would say where I really stopped were the abstract expressionists in the New York school.

  Vera Wang

  Art, New York, School

  "Bridget Foley’s Diary: Vera’s Vision". Interview with Bridget Foley, wwd.com. June 3, 2013.

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• Ideas are like fish. If you want to catch little fish, you can stay in the shallow water. But if you want to catch the big fish, you’ve got to go deeper. Down deep, the fish are more powerful and more pure.They’re huge and abstract. And they’re very beautiful.

  David Lynch

  Beautiful, Powerful, Ideas

  "Catching the Big Fish: Meditation, Consciousness, and Creativity". Book by David Lynch, December 27, 2007.

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• I know the stars are my home. I learned about them, needed them for survival in terms of navigation. I know where I am when I look up at the sky. I know where I am when I look up at the Moon; it's not just some abstract romantic idea, it's something very real to me. See, I've expanded my home.

  Gene Cernan

  Stars, Real, Home

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• The biggest adversary in our life is ourselves. We are what we are, in a sense, because of the dominating thoughts we allow to gather in our head. All concepts of self-improvement, all actions and paths we take, relate solely to our abstract image of ourselves. Life is limited only by how we really see ourselves and feel about our being. A great deal of pure self-knowledge and inner understanding allows us to lay an all-important foundation for the structure of our life from which we can perceive and take the right avenues.

  Bruce Lee

  Self, Understanding, Important

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• Genuine trust involves allowing another to matter and have an impact in our lives. For that reason, many who hate and do battle with God trust Him more deeply than those whose complacent faith permits an abstract and motionless stance before Him. Those who trust God most are those whose faith permits them to risk wrestling with Him over the deepest questions of life. Good hearts are captured in a divine wrestling match; fearful, doubting hearts stay clear of the mat.

  Dan B. Allender

  Good Life, Hate, Heart

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• Revenge is a particularly interesting concept, especially the notion of whether or not it exists outside of just an abstract idea.

  Christopher Nolan

  Revenge, Ideas, Interesting

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• Condemnation by category is the lowest form of hatred, for it is cold-hearted and abstract, lacking even the courage of a personal hatred.

  Wendell Berry

  Hatred, Cold Hearted, Condemnation

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• An abstract painting need in 50 years by no means look "abstract" any longer.

  Marcel Duchamp

  Art, Mean, Years

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• With God thoughts are colors, with us they are pigments-even the most abstract one may be accompanied by physical pain.

  Georg C. Lichtenberg

  Pain, Color, May

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• Write a paper promising salvation, make it a "structured" something or a "virtual" something, or "abstract," "distributed" or "higher-order" or "applicative" and you can almost be certain of having started a new cult.

  Edsger Dijkstra

  Writing, Order, Paper

  "My hopes of computing science" by Edsger Dijkstra, www.cs.utexas.edu. April 1979.

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• Good writing, and this is especially important in a subject such as economics, must also involve the reader in the matter at hand. It is not enough to explain. The images that are in the mind of the writer must be made to reappear in the mind of the reader, and it is the absence of this ability that causes much economic writing to be condemned, quite properly, as abstract.

  John Kenneth Galbraith

  Writing, Hands, Mind

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• For centuries, we in the West have thought of ourselves as rational animals whose mental capacities transcend our bodily nature. In this traditional view our minds are abstract, logical, unemotionally rational, consciously accessible, and, above all, able to directly fit and represent the world. Language has a special place in thie view of what a human is - it is a privileged, logical symbol system internal to our minds that transparently expresses abstract concepts that are defined in terms of the external world itself.

  George Lakoff

  Animal, Views, Mind

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• I feel it's just some sort of game if it's just abstract.

  Jeffrey Smart

  Art, Games, Feels

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• When we tell our own story, we teach the values that our choices reveal, not as abstract principals, but as our lived experience. We reveal the kind of person we are to the extent that we let others identify with us.

  Marshall Ganz

  Inspirational, Kindness, Choices

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• All paintings start out of a mood, out of a relationship with things or people, out of a complete visual impression. To call this expression abstract seems to me often to confuse the issue. Abstract means literally to draw from or separate. In this sense every artist is abstract . . . a realistic or non-objective approach makes no difference. The result is what counts.

  Richard Diebenkorn

  Mean, Artist, Expression

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• With an abstract idea it is possible to enter into a relation of formal knowledge, to become enthusiastic about it, and perhaps even to put it into practice; but it can never be followed in personal obedience. Christianity without the living Christ is inevitably Christianity without discipleship, and Christianity without discipleship is always Christianity without Christ.

  Dietrich Bonhoeffer

  Practice, Ideas, Christianity

  Dietrich Bonhoeffer (2015). “The Cost of Discipleship”, p.17, SCM Press

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• But harmony is limitation. Thus rightness of limitation is essential for growth of reality. Unlimited possibility and abstract creativity can procure nothing.

  Alfred North Whitehead

  Creativity, Reality, Growth

  Alfred North Whitehead (2011). “Religion in the Making”, p.137, Cambridge University Press

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• Money alone is absolutely good, because it is not only a concrete satisfaction of one need in particular; it is an abstract satisfaction of all.

  Arthur Schopenhauer

  Needs, Satisfaction, Concrete

  Arthur Schopenhauer (2016). “The Wisdom of Life”, p.33, Cosimo Classics

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• The overscaled compositions being produced by so many abstract painters, which are full of movement and use of color, are ideal example, ideal transformations of an entire wall and entire room.... There is no denying that one of the major attractions of these successful large compositions is their structural decorative use in the contemporary scene... That these large canvases can be superbly decorative may not be considered complimentary by some of the artists involved.

  Van Day Truex

  Wall, Successful, Artist

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• How many people become abstract as a way of appearing profound.

  Joseph Joubert

  People, Profound, Way

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• Abstract words are ancient coins whose concrete images in the give and take of talk have worn away with use.

  Julian Jaynes

  Giving, Use, Coins

  Julian Jaynes (2000). “The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind”, p.61, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• I think most people, when they think about the Black Panther Party, they think in very abstract, caricatured terms. They think about black fists in the air, but they don't think about the actual people, and the families, and the relationships.

  Kerry Washington

  Party, Thinking, Air

  "Kerry Washington" by Sam Adams, www.avclub.com. December 09, 2010.

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• Black and White is essentially an abstract way to interpret and transform what one might refer to as reality. My purpose in taking photographs over the past forty years has ultimately been about defining myself. It has been fundamentally a psychological and existential journey.

  Roger Ballen

  Black And White, Past, Journey

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• Existentialism does not offer to the reader the consolations of an abstract evasion: existentialism proposes no evasion. On the contrary, its ethics is experienced in the truth of life, and it then appears as the only proposition of salvation which one can address to men.

  Simone de Beauvoir

  Men, Doe, Addresses

  Martin Heidegger, Simone de Beauvoir, Jean-Paul Sartre (2016). “The Philosophical Library Existentialism Collection: Essays in Metaphysics, The Ethics of Ambiguity, and The Philosophy of Existentialism”, p.134, Open Road Media

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