Abstract Quotes

All men in the abstract are just and good

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

Funerals are all abstract ceremony.

— Chuck Palahniuk

I like it when I can get really abstract.

— Richard McGuire

“Beasts abstract not.”

— John Locke

All good art is abstract in its structure.

— Paul Strand

Even abstract shapes must have a likeness

— Willem de Kooning

“the abstract reveals after a second”

— Jinzo Sloatch

Money is human happiness in the abstract.

— Arthur Schopenhauer

Americans have no capacity for abstract thought, and make bad coffee.

— Georges Clemenceau

I wear my pants on my upper torso to be abstract and different.

— Thom Yorke

Abstract paintings must be as real as those created by the 16th century Italians.

— Frank Stella

Abstract art has helped us to experience the emotional power inherent in pure form.

— Anton Ehrenzweig

Tenderness can be just as abstract as insanity.

— Anonymous

Think of an abstract painting as very, very low relief - a thing, not a picture.

— Jerry Saltz

How many people become abstract as a way of appearing profound.

— Joseph Joubert

Oh abstractions are just abstract until they have an ache in them.

— Stephen Dunn

There is nothing abstract about pain. It is specific, it is real, and, when it is intense, it is world destroying.

— Albert Camus

While those whom devotion to abstract discussions has rendered unobservant of the facts are too ready to dogmatize on the basis of…

— Aristotle

The law is not abstract, impartially arbitrating between conflicting social classes; it is a tool in the hands of those who govern.

— Josephine Herbst

Far from being antecedent principles that animate the process, law, language, truth are but abstract names for its results.

— William James

One of the most striking of abstract art's appearances is her nakedness, an art stripped bare.

— Robert Motherwell

By phonemic trans-formation into visual terms, the alphabet became a universal, abstract, static container of meaningless sounds

— Marshall McLuhan

I'm always going back and forth between wanting to do stuff that's abstract and stuff that's just telling everybody to listen.

— Jenny Hval

Cryptic messages and abstract statements are littered throughout the music of Happy Birthday, but it hasn't made the band's sun-baked pop-rock any…

— Anthony Fantano

terrorism is interesting to a novelist because it's a crime that's driven by an idea, as opposed to some kind of base…

— Karan Mahajan

Abstract work, if one wishes to do it well, must be allowed to destroy one's humanity; one raises a monument which is…

— Bertrand Russell

When art seems to be empty of meaning, as no doubt some of the abstract painting of our own day actually does…

— Lewis Mumford

The process of schooling does not give birth to human beings - as education should but never will so long as it…

— Derrick Jensen

It would be very hard to write a serious drama and say some of these things. You can be much more abstract…

— George A. Romero

I saw money becoming more and more important everywhere. It's one of the most abstract and important inventions by human beings. At…

— Costa-Gavras

No matter how much a young man likes to think for himself, he is always trying to model himself on some abstract…

— Cesare Pavese

To me, it seems more realistic to my thought process when things feel a little scattered in the lyrics. Being disjointed is…

— Aesop Rock

I started realizing that one of the great things about opera is that if you make the right kind of story, you…

— Tod Machover

When, for example, in the name of non-discrimination, people try to force the Catholic Church to change her position on homosexuality or…

— Pope Benedict XVI

The new tinge to modern minds is a vehement and passionate interest in the relation of general principles to irreducible and stubborn…

— Alfred North Whitehead

I met Michael Snow and Stan Brakhage the second day after I arrived, you know. I had never seen or heard of…

— Babette Mangolte

Electric and magnetic forces. May they live for ever, and never be forgot, if only to remind us that the science of…

— Oliver Heaviside

Soldiers join the military to serve their country, but when bullets are flying, it's hard to fight for an abstract notion like…

— Sebastian Junger

We can tell people abstract rules of thumb which we have derived from prior experiences, but it is very difficult for other…

— Anonymous

Brutes abstract not. -- If it may be doubted, whether beasts compound and enlarge their ideas, that way, to any degree; this,…

— John Locke