Abstraction Quotes - Page 19

• Early-twentieth-century abstraction is art's version of Einstein's Theory of Relativity. It's the idea that changed everything everywhere: quickly, decisively, for good.

  Jerry Saltz

  Art, Ideas, Theory

  "Saltz: MoMA’s Inventing Abstraction Is Illuminating—Although It Shines That Light Mighty Selectively". www.vulture.com. January 6, 2013.

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• It took me twenty years to get Steven Parrino's work. From the time I first saw his art, in the mid-eighties, I almost always dismissed it as mannered, Romantic, formulaic, conceptualist-formalist heavy-metal boy-art abstraction.

  Jerry Saltz

  Art, Boys, Years

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• Willem de Kooning is generally credited for coming out of the painterly gates strong in the forties, revolutionizing art and abstraction and reaching incredible heights by the early fifties, and then tailing off.

  Jerry Saltz

  Art, Strong, Height

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• Abstraction is everybody's zero but nobody's nought.

  Robert Smithson

  Zero, Artist

  Robert Smithson, Jack D. Flam (1996). “Robert Smithson, the Collected Writings”, p.42, Univ of California Press

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• Washington isn't a city, it's an abstraction.

  Dylan Thomas

  Cities

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• When we are mired in the relative world, never lifting our gaze to the mystery, our life is stunted, incomplete; we are filled with yearning for that paradise that is lost when, as young children, we replace it with words and ideas and abstractions - such as merit, such as past, present, and future - our direct, spontaneous experience of the thing itself, in the beauty and precision of this present moment.

  Peter Matthiessen

  Children, Past, Ideas

  Peter Matthiessen (1998). “Nine-Headed Dragon River: Zen Journals 1969-1982”, p.16, Shambhala Publications

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• The reader must come armed , in a serious state of intellectual readiness. This is not easy because he comes to the text alone. In reading, one's responses are isolated, one'sintellect thrown back on its own resourses. To be confronted by the cold abstractions of printed sentences is to look upon language bare, without the assistance of either beauty or community. Thus, reading is by its nature a serious business. It is also, of course, an essentially rational activity.

  Neil Postman

  Reading, Community, Intellectual

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• Essentially, perspective is a form of abstraction. It simplifies the relationship between eye, brain and object. It is an ideal view, imagined as being seen by a one-eyed, motionless person who is clearly detached from what he sees. It makes a God of the spectator, who becomes the person on whom the whole world converges, the Unmoved Onlooker.

  Robert Hughes

  Eye, Views, Perspective

  Robert Hughes (2015). “The Spectacle of Skill: New and Selected Writings of Robert Hughes”, p.25, Vintage

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• To make someone an icon is to make him an abstraction, and abstractions are incapable of vital communication with living people.

  David Foster Wallace

  Communication, Icons, People

  David Foster Wallace (2005). “Consider the Lobster: And Other Essays”, p.157, Hachette UK

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• Developing Christlike attributes in our lives is not an easy task, especially when we move away from generalities and abstractions and begin to deal with real life. The test comes in practicing what we proclaim. The reality check comes when Christlike attributes need to become visible in our lives—as husband or wife, as father or mother, as son or daughter, in our friendships, in our employment, in our business, and in our recreation. We can recognize our growth, as can those around us, as we gradually increase our capacity to 'act in all holiness before [Him]' (D&C 43:9).

  Dieter F. Uchtdorf

  Daughter, Mother, Husband

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• The philosopher Elaine Scarry has observed that "beauty always takes place in the particular." Cruelty, on the other hand, prefers abstraction.

  Jonathan Safran Foer

  Hands, Philosopher, Cruelty

  "Eating Animals". Book by Jonathan Safran Foer, 2010.

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• I could not bear the deep freeze settling around my bones at the thought that yet another attempt to get out of my life alive would end in disappointment. Time became palpable and viscous. Every minute, every second, every nanosecond, wrapped around my spine so that my nerves tightened and ached. I faded into abstraction. A self-generated narcosis created a painful blank where my mind used to be.

  Elizabeth Wurtzel

  Disappointment, Self, Mind

  Elizabeth Wurtzel (2014). “Prozac Nation: Young and Depressed in America”, p.111, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• Time is an absurdity. An abstraction. The only thing that matters is this moment. This moment a million times over. You have to trust me. If this moment is repeated enough, if you keep trying — and you have to keep trying — eventually you will come across the next item on your list.

  Jonathan Nolan

  Over You, Trying, Matter

  "Memento Mori". Short story by Jonathan Nolan, www.esquire.com. January 29, 2007.

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• The abstraction is often the most definite form for the intangible thing in myself that I can clarify in paint.

  Georgia O'Keeffe

  Art, Paint, Form

  Georgia O'Keeffe, Jonathan Stuhlman, Barbara Buhler Lynes (2007). “Georgia O'Keeffe: Circling Around Abstraction”, p.15, Hudson Hills

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• Cancer begins and ends with people. In the midst of scientific abstraction, it is sometimes possible to forget this one basic fact. Doctors treat diseases but they also treat people, and this precondition of their professional existence sometimes pulls them in two directions at once.

  June Goodfield

  Cancer, Doctors, Two

  June Goodfield (1975). “The Siege of Cancer”

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• Physics is an otherworld thing, it requires a taste for things unseen, even unheard of- a high degree of abstraction... These faculties die off somehow when you grow up... profound curiosity happens when children are young. I think physicists are the Peter Pans of the human race... Once you are sophisticated, you know too much- far too much. Pauli once said to me, "I know a great deal. I know too much. I am a quantum ancient.".

  Isidor Isaac Rabi

  Growing Up, Children, Thinking

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• There is nothing mysterious, as some have tried to maintain, about the applicability of mathematics. What we get by abstraction from something can be returned.

  Raymond Louis Wilder

  Math, Mysterious, Mathematics

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• The main reason why men and women make different aesthetic judgments is the fact that the latter, generally incapable of abstraction, only admire what meets their complete approval.

  Franz Grillparzer

  Men, Appreciate, Different

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• If you have had your attention directed to the novelties in thought in your own lifetime, you will have observed that almost all really new ideas have a certain aspect of foolishness when they are first produced, and almost any idea which jogs you out of your current abstractions may be better than nothing.

  Alfred North Whitehead

  Ideas, Attention, May

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• I have painted portraits that to me are almost photographic. I remember hesitating to show the paintings, they looked so real to me. But they have passed into the world as abstractions - no one seeing what they are.

  Georgia O'Keeffe

  Real, Portraits, World

  Georgia O'Keeffe, Barbara Haskell, Museum of Fine Arts (Museum of New Mexico) (1985). “Georgia O'Keeffe, Works on Paper: Museum of Fine Arts, Museum of New Mexico, Santa Fe”, Museum of New Mexico Pr

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• When a man knows that the abstraction ten exists - nothing on earth can stop him from looking for the fact of eleven.

  Lorraine Hansberry

  Men, Curiosity, Earth

  Lorraine Hansberry (2012). “Les Blancs: The Collected Last Plays: The Drinking Gourd/What Use Are Flowers?”, p.114, Vintage

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• I cannot worship the abstractions of virtue: she only charms me when she addresses herself to my heart, speaks through the love from which she springs.

  Reinhold Niebuhr

  Spring, Heart, Addresses

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• Abstraction in photography is ridiculous, and is only an imitation of painting. We stopped imitating painters a hundred years ago, so to imitate them in this day and age is laughable.

  Berenice Abbott

  Photography, Years, Age

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• Writing is the hammer & chisel that breaks down the established way of thinking. A concrete event, then an abstraction. An image, then a thought. Finally, writing builds another establishment with the fragments.

  Diane Glancy

  Writing, Thinking, Events

  Diane Glancy (1996). “Claiming Breath”, p.23, U of Nebraska Press

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• In 'Self Comes to Mind' I pay a lot of attention to simple creatures without brains or minds, because those 'cartooned abstractions of who we are' operate on precisely the same principles that we do.

  Antonio Damasio

  Simple, Self, Brain

  "Self Comes To Mind". Interview with Jonah Lehrer, www.wired.com. November 8, 2010.

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