Abstraction Quotes - Page 11

• The intellectual is engage-he is pledged, committed, enlisted. What everyone else is willing to admit, namely that ideas and abstractions are of signal importance in human life, he imperatively feels.

  Richard Hofstadter

  Ideas, Intellectual, Signals

  Richard Hofstadter (2012). “Anti-Intellectualism in American Life”, p.28, Vintage

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• When I paint from a photograph, conscious thinking is eliminated. I don't know what I am doing. My work is far closer to the Informel than to any kind of 'realism'. The photograph has an abstraction of its own, which is not easy to see through.

  Gerhard Richter

  Art, Thinking, Painting

  FaceBook post by Gerhard Richter from Aug 11, 2015

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• ... landscapes or still-lifes I paint in between the abstract works; they constitute about one-tenth of my production. On the one hand they are useful, because I like to work from nature - although I do use a photograph - because I think that any detail from nature has a logic I would like to see in abstraction as well.

  Gerhard Richter

  Art, Thinking, Hands

  Gerhard Richter, Dietmar Elger, Hans-Ulrich Obrist (2009). “Gerhard Richter: writings 1961-2007”, Distributed Art Pub Inc

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• I started doing 'figures', then, one day, all of a sudden, I started doing abstraction. And then I started doing both. But it was never really a conscious decision. It was simply a question of desire. In fact, I really prefer making figurative work, but the figure is difficult. So to work around the difficulty I take a break and paint abstractly. Which I really like, by the way, because it allows me to make beautiful paintings.

  Gerhard Richter

  Beautiful, Art, Decision

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• Cloud storage in data centers will utilize the latest developments in physical storage virtualization, deduplication and other methods to make the most effective use of physical storage assets. Software defined storage could allow a further level of abstraction and cost effectiveness. The vast bulk of content stored "in the cloud" will reside on large SATA interface HDDs with some on magnetic (mostly LTO) tape (particularly for "archives.")

  Tom Coughlin

  Clouds, Data, Effectiveness

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• The economy is not an abstraction. The economy consists of people, and it will only grow if people feel secure and are reasonably free.

  John Bruton

  People, Economy, Grows

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• I have this certain vision of the way I want my comics to look; this sort of photographic realism, but with a certain abstraction that comics can give. It's kind of a fine line.

  Daniel Clowes

  Giving, Vision, Lines

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• What I hope is I'll eventually be seen as an actual individual, not as some abstraction - an art dealer running a museum.

  Jeffrey Deitch

  Running, Art, Museums

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• My forms are not abstractions of things in the real world. They're also not symbols. I would say that my job is to invent these forms and to put them together in a way that keeps your interest, to give the forms a quirky identity so you can engage with them, so you realize there's an inner intelligence or logic.

  Caio Fonseca

  Jobs, Real, Giving

  "Caio Fonseca Comes Out of Isolation". Interview with Meghan Dailey, www.interviewmagazine.com. March 28, 2012.

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• It is not that uncommon for the cost of an abstraction to outweigh the benefit it delivers. Kill one today!

  John Carmack

  Cost, Benefits, Today

  Twitter post from Oct 11, 2010

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• This (functional - E.W.) language controls by reducing the linguistic forms and symbols of reflection, abstraction, development, contradiction; by substituting images for concepts. It denies or absorbs the transcendent vocabulary; it does not search for but establishes and imposes truth and falsehood.

  Herbert Marcuse

  Reflection, Vocabulary, Doe

  Herbert Marcuse (2013). “One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society”, p.106, Routledge

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• Use no superfluous word, no adjective, which does not reveal something. Don't use such an expression as 'dim land of peace.' It dulls the image. It mixes an abstraction with the concrete. It comes from the writer's not realizing that the natural object is always the adequate symbol. Go in fear of abstraction.

  Ezra Pound

  Writing, Expression, Land

  Ernest Fenollosa, Ezra Pound (2009). “The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry: A Critical Edition”, p.9, Fordham Univ Press

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• We must not be frightened nor cajoled into accepting evil as deliverance from evil. We must go on struggling to be human, though monsters of abstractions police and threaten us.

  Robert Hayden

  Struggle, Evil, Political

  Robert Hayden (2013). “Collected Poems”, p.98, W. W. Norton & Company

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• I'd say that my profession ends where architectural thinking ends - architectural thinking in terms of thinking about programs and organizational structure. These abstractions play a role in many other disciplines, and those disciplines are now defining their 'architectures' as well.

  Rem Koolhaas

  Thinking, Play, Discipline

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• The increased abstraction in mathematics that took place during the early part of this century was paralleled by a similar trend in the arts. In both cases, the increased level of abstraction demands greater effort on the part of anyone who wants to understand the work.

  Keith Devlin

  Art, Effort, Levels

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• Meditation is the use of symbols, not abstractions. A symbol is something alive. It is a hyphen between one reality and another.

  Frederick Lenz

  Buddhism, Reality, Meditation

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• Whether a photo or music, or a drawing or anything else I might do—it’s ultimately all an abstraction of my peculiar experience.

  William Eggleston

  Drawing, Peculiar, Might

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• The only real life is the collective life of the race; individual life has no existence except as an abstraction.

  Auguste Comte

  Real, Race, Life Is

  Auguste Comte, John Henry Bridges (1865). “A General View of Positivism”, p.387, London, Trübner and Company

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• As Enlightenment philosophers and scholars consciously adopted the methods of science to establish such abstract concepts as rights, liberty, and justice, successive generations have become schooled in thinking of these abstractions as applied to others in matrices-like mental rotations.

  Michael Shermer

  Thinking, Rights, Justice

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• Absolute honesty is as absurd an abstraction as an absolute temperature or an absolute value.

  George Bernard Shaw

  Honesty, Temperature, Absurd

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• Abstraction is an exercise in a pre-assured failure. It is a futile attempt to communicate the non-communicable

  Derek R. Audette

  Art, Exercise, Communicate

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• People who blame the Bible for the modern destruction of nature have failed to see its delight in the variety and individuality of creatures and its insistence upon their holiness. But that delight-in, say, the final chapters of Job or the 104th Psalm-is far more useful to the cause of conservation than the undifferentiating abstractions of science... Reverence gives standing to creatures, and to our perception of them, just as the law gives standing to a citizen.

  Wendell Berry

  Jobs, Animal, Law

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• When truth is nothing but truth, it's unnatural, it's an abstraction that resembles nothing in the real world.

  Aldous Huxley

  Real, World, Truth Is

  Aldous Huxley “The Collected Works of Aldous Huxley”

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• It does not at first appear that an astronomer rapt in abstraction, while he gazes on a star, must feel more exquisite delight than a farmer who is conducting his team.

  Isaac D'Israeli

  Stars, Team, Atheism

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• The love of fame is too high and delicate a feeling in the mind to be mixed up with realities, it is a solitary abstraction. * * * A name "fast anchored in the deep abyss of time" is like a star twinkling in the firmament, cold, silent, distant, but eternal and sublime; and our transmitting one to posterity is as if we should contemplate our translation to the skies.

  William Hazlitt

  Stars, Reality, Sky

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