Abstraction Quotes - Page 20

• Even an abstract form has to have a likeness.

  Willem de Kooning

  Abstract, Form

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• Abstract pictures are fictive models, because they make visible a reality that we can neither see nor describe, but whose existence we can postulate.

  Gerhard Richter

  Reality, Abstract, Existence

  FaceBook post by Gerhard Richter from Jun 07, 2013

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• If I choose abstraction over reality, it is because I consider it the lesser chaos.

  Robert Breault

  Reality, Chaos, Ifs

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• Abstract art is a fundamental distrust of the theory of reality concocted by the eyes.

  Robert Breault

  Art, Eye, Reality

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• Abstraction is itself an abstract word and has no single meaning ... Every word in our language is abstract, because it represents something else.

  Eric Maisel

  Language, Abstract

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• The dynamic element in my philosophy, taken as a whole, can be seen as an obstinate and untiring battle against the spirit of abstraction.

  Gabriel Marcel

  Philosophy, Taken, Battle

  Gabriel Marcel (1952). “Men against humanity”

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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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• True to her inveterate habit, rationalism reverts to 'principles,' and thinks that when an abstraction once is named, we own an oracular solution.

  William James

  Thinking, Principles, Habit

  William James (2013). “Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking (New Thought Edition - Secret Library)”, p.105, Lulu Press, Inc

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