Abstract Quotes · Page 19

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

— Robert Motherwell

I guess I have no motivation to make an abstract painting, even if they sometimes read as abstract. I think, with abstraction,…

— Joe Bradley

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

— Aristotle

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

— Albert Camus

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

— William James

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

— Josephine Herbst

Being design-led means designers take ideas from the abstract to the concrete, from potential to real value.

— Jens Martin Skibsted

The purely abstract theorist runs the risk that, as with modern decor, the furniture of the mind will be sparse, bare, and…

— Robert K. Merton

On an incredibly simplistic level, you can think of depression as occurring when your cortex thinks an abstract thought and manages to…

— Robert M. Sapolsky

It's all about this abstract entity called the story. It's all about the best way to tell the story, and to make…

— Jose Padilha

I loved surrealism and abstract painting, and anything related to those. I always thought painting was the highest form of art. What…

— Neil Farber

There's a tiredness of abstract inteligence, and it's the most horrible of tirednesses. It doesn't weight on you like the tiredness of…

— Fernando Pessoa

I think that magic, at its root, is a very abstract notion. There's no real, approved definition. And, in that sense, it's…

— Drummond Money-Coutts

Sophie Germain proved to the world that even a woman can accomplish something in the most rigorous and abstract of sciences and…

— Carl Friedrich Gauss

The underlying attraction of the movement of water and sand is biological. If we look more deeply we can see it as…

— Geoffrey Jellicoe

I don't have to think too hard to keep my writing within a certain narrative thread. That happens because certain words trigger…

— Luke Temple

Abstract understanding doesn't mean arbitrary sloshing and messing. Abstract art is controlled visual magic based on laws and methodology. Abstraction generally involves…

— Robert Genn

[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

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

— William Barrett

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

— Edward Ruscha

There are no limitations with a song. To me a song is a little piece of art. It can be whatever you…

— Laura Nyro

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

— Gregory Bateson

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

— Christopher Strachey

A species has to become pretty intellectually advanced in order to grasp the concept of death in the abstract, and to dream…

— Neal Stephenson

To give the theory plenty of 'rope' and see if it hangs itself eventually is better tactics than to choke it off…

— William James

You make knowledge relevant to life and you make it important for children to learn things that will really relate to things…

— Talib Kweli

You have to have the time to feel sorry for yourself in order to be a good abstract expressionist.

— Robert Rauschenberg

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

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

— John F. Kennedy

Just because I try to read a lot of stuff doesn't mean I can fully conceptualize all of these intense, big, abstract…

— James Ransone

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

— Auguste Comte

You can't buy your privacy back. Because I was already doing OK, and to have this abstract amount of money now, I…

— David Choe

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

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

For a painter as abstract as myself, the collages offer a way of incorporating bits of the everyday world into pictures.

— Robert Motherwell

I don't like [to] make a woman ... an abstract concept of the fashion. I don't like [to] say, "You must wear…

— Yves Saint Laurent

All investigations of Time, however sophisticated or abstract, have at their true base the human fear of mortality.

— Thomas Pynchon

Praise or blame has but a momentary effect on the man whose love of beauty in the abstract makes him a severe…

— John Keats

Everybody knows that abstract art can be art, and most people know that they may not like it, even if they understand…

— Roy Lichtenstein

Great paintings have gradations, large and small... They serve to lift the subject off the two-dimensionality of the canvas. Gradations are an…

— Robert Genn