Abstract Quotes · Page 18

And while I was not an admirer of people in the specific, I liked them in the abstract. It is only the…

— Elizabeth McCracken

I hate women, hate them generally, not in particular but in an abstract way. I hate them because one never really learns…

— Orson Welles

A lot of people go to the movies wanting the movie to be about feelings, and it's really not about that. Or…

— Steven Soderbergh

An abstract style is always bad. Your sentences should be full of stones, metals, chairs, tables, animals, men, and women.

— Alain de Lille

"Terrorism" is a metaphor, it's an abstract noun. It's like having a war on dandruff. It's something from advertising, it's meaningless.

— Gore Vidal

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

Women have no sense of the abstract-a woman admiring the sky is a woman caressing the sky. In a woman's mind beauty…

— Jean Giraudoux

Abstract art is a creative interplay between the conscious and the unconscious, with the conscious mind making all the final decisions and…

— Lawren Harris

The type of contract between players and producers is, I feel, antiquated in form and abstract in concept. We have no privacies…

— Teresa Wright

If language naturally evolves to serve the needs of tiny rodents with tiny rodent brains, then what's unique about language isn't the…

— Temple Grandin

Everything abstract is ultimately part of the concrete. Everything inanimate finally serves the living. That is why every activity dealing in abstraction…

— Edith Stein

The whole body of what is now called moral or ethical truth existed in the golden age as abstract science. Or, if…

— Henry David Thoreau

It would not be easy even for an unbeliever, to find a better translation of the rule of virtue from the abstract…

— John Stuart Mill

We shall find the abstract equivalent for all forms & elements in the universe, then we shall combine them in sculptural constructions…

— Giacomo Balla

...the materialism of modern civilization is paradoxically founded on a hatred of materiality, a goal-oriented desire to obliterate all natural limits through…

— Alan Watts

I am fine, though it is hard to think of what kind of work to make at this point, other than decorative,…

— Cindy Sherman

It has long been my personal view that the separation of practical and theoretical work is artificial and injurious. Much of the…

— Christopher Strachey

Science sometimes improves hypotheses and sometimes disproves them. But proof would be another matter and perhaps never occurs except in the realms…

— Gregory Bateson

The anceints devoted a lifetime to the study of arithmetic; it required days to extract a square root or to multiply two…

— John Perry

What persuades men and women to mistake each other from time to time for gods or vermin is ideology. One can understand…

— Terry Eagleton

[T]he 47th proposition in Euclid might now be voted down with as much ease as any proposition in politics; and therefore if…

— Sydney Smith

A lot of abstract painters seem to be doing everything all at once now. And so these different styles are jibing and…

— Edward Ruscha

“We have come to understand the phenomena of life only as an assemblage of the lifeless. We take the mechanistic abstractions of…

— William Barrett

Within a social structure, a familial structure, or a cultural structure of various kinds, there is a substitute for actual freedom. I…

— Katherine Dunn

When I examine myself and my methods of thought, I come to the conclusion that the gift of fantasy has meant more…

— Albert Einstein

I wish to approach truth as closely as is possible, and therefore I abstract everything until I arrive at the fundamental quality…

— Piet Mondrian

If the abstract paintings show my reality, then the landscapes and still-lifes show my yearning.

— Gerhard Richter

Talk with M. Hermite. He never evokes a concrete image, yet you soon perceive that the more abstract entities are to him…

— Henri Poincare

Mathematics is the tool specially suited for dealing with abstract concepts of any kind and there is no limit to its power…

— Paul Dirac

It makes no difference whether a work is naturalistic or abstract; every visual expression follows the same fundamental laws

— Hans Hofmann

In a strict sense photography can never be abstract, for the camera is incapable of synthetic integration.

— Ansel Adams

I abstract it in my photographs: I like large planes and spaces, areas of texture and light, like deserts or oceans or…

— Herb Ritts

To abstract is to draw out the essence of a matter. To abstract in art is to separate certain fundamentals from irrelevant…

— Ben Shahn

I firmly believe that a representational painting is only as strong as its abstract components.

— Robert Reynolds

It is sometimes forgotten how much wit there is in certain works of abstract art. There is a certain point in undergoing…

— Robert Motherwell

Freedom is not merely a word or an abstract theory, but the most effective instrument for advancing the welfare of man.

— John F. Kennedy

Within two hours of where I live, you have mountains and desert as location. I like the natural elements that abstract into…

— Herb Ritts

NASA is my favorite website. The universe with its abstract nature attracts me. The abstract element in my poetry comes from there.

— Gulzar

Each department of knowledge passes through three stages. The theoretic stage; the theological stage and the metaphysical or abstract stage.

— Auguste Comte

We favor the visible, the embedded, the personal, the narrated, and the tangible; we scorn the abstract.

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb