Abstract Quotes - Page 8

• Like Aristotle, conservatives generally accept the world as it is; they distrust the politics of abstract reason – that is, reason divorced from experience.

  Benjamin Wiker

  World, Reason, Accepting

  Benjamin Wiker (2010). “10 Books Every Conservative Must Read: Plus Four Not to Miss and One Impostor”, p.14, Regnery Publishing

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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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• 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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• 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 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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• 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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• 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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• But there's a fourth interpretation: Obama can't leave his comfort zone. No president since Woodrow Wilson has been as enamored of abstract ideas or more sure that disagreement with him is proof of ignorance, bad faith or dogmatism. As a candidate, he insisted his real opponent was 'cynicism,' and in his address last week, he returned to this trite formulation, insisting again he was bravely battling the cynics.

  Jonah Goldberg

  Real, Ignorance, Ideas

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• What a funny thing painting is. The abstract painters always insist on their connection with the visible reality, while the so called figurative artists insist that what they really care about, is the abstract qualities of life.

  Marlene Dumas

  Inspiring, Art, Reality

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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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• 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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• It's not about facts, it's about feelings. It's about remembering feelings and happiness. A definition of art is that it makes concrete our most subtle emotions. I think the highest form of art is music. It's the most abstract of all art expression.

  Agnes Martin

  Happiness, Art, Thinking

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• When I began as an artist, I already did not like expressionism, or abstract expressionism, because abstract painting had already been done. I did not want to belong to any one group or the other, and I'm not one or the other.

  Georg Baselitz

  Artist, Done, Painting

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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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• 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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• True Christianity is not merely believing a certain set of dry abstract propositions: it is to live in daily personal communication with an actual living person - Jesus Christ.

  J. C. Ryle

  Jesus, Believe, Communication

  J.C Ryle, Rev Terry Kulakowski, Editor “PRACTICAL RELIGION”, Lulu.com

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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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• 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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• [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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• 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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