Abstract Quotes - Page 11

• The abstract kills, the concrete saves.

  Sylvia Plath

  Concrete

  Sylvia Plath (2013). “The Journals of Sylvia Plath”, p.287, Anchor

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• I grew up a faithful person. I never lost faith. I prayed every day all throughout my life. But at some point in life, my faith became fairly abstract. And I lost this belief that we have a personal relationship with Jesus Christ.

  Carly Fiorina

  Jesus, Faithful, Belief

  "Fox News Sunday" with Chris Wallace, www.foxnews.com. May 31, 2015.

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• The body should not just be something you see. It's also the inside of it. It's frightening and abstract and much more than pretty or not pretty. The shape of it is boring.

  Jenny Hval

  Body, Shapes, Boring

  "Jenny Hval's Soft Dick Rock". Interview with Jenn Pelly, pitchfork.com. June 15, 2015.

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• Delacroix, Wagner, Baudelaire - all great theorists, bent on dominating other minds by sensuous means. Their one dream was to create the irresistible effect - to intoxicate, or overwhelm. They looked to analysis to provide them with the keyboard on which to play, with certainty, on man's emotions, and they sought in abstract meditation they key to sure and certain action upon their subject - man's nervous and psychic being.

  Charles Baudelaire

  Dream, Mean, Men

  "Degas, Manet, Morisot". Book by Paul Valéry, 1989.

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• I often told the fanatics of realism that there is no such thing as realism in art: it only exists in the mind of the observer. Art is a symbol, a thing conjuring up reality in our mental image. That is why I don't see any contradiction between abstract and figurative art either.

  Antoni Tapies

  Art, Reality, Mind

  "Tàpies, Werke auf Papier 1943 - 2003" by Antoni Tapies, Kunsthalle Emden, edited by Achim Sommer, Altana, (p. 25), 2004.

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• Artists with a capital 'A' are at ease working in all areas of art, whether it is a contemporary abstract painting or work requiring methods and techniques of the Renaissance Masters.

  Igor Babailov

  Art, Technique, Abstract Painting

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• The kind of painting which I find exciting is not necessarily representational or non-representational, but it is musical and architectural... Whether this visual relationship is slightly more or slightly less abstract is, for me, beside the point.

  Ben Nicholson

  Musical, Painting, Kind

  Peter Khoroche, Ben Nicholson (2002). “Ben Nicholson: drawings and painted reliefs”, Lund Humphries Publishers

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• The fact that astrology nevertheless yields valid results proves that it is not the apparent positions of the stars which work, but rather the times which are measured or determined by arbitrarily named stellar positions. Time thus proves to be a stream of energy filled with qualities and not, as our philosophy would have it, an abstract concept or precondition of knowledge.

  Carl Jung

  Stars, Philosophy, Astrology

  Carl Gustav Jung, Roderick Main (1997). “Jung on Synchronicity and the Paranormal”, p.79, Psychology Press

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• Can an idea a notion as abstract as Relativism produce by itself the effects alleged? cause all the harm, destroy all the lives and reputations? I am as far as anyone can be from denying the power of ideas in history, but the suggestion that a philosophy (as Relativism is often called) has perverted millions and debased daily life is on the face of it absurd. No idea working alone has ever demoralized society, and there have been plenty of ideas simpler and more exciting than Relativism.

  Jacques Barzun

  Philosophy, Ideas, Working Alone

  Jacques Barzun (1989). “The Culture We Deserve”, p.89, Wesleyan University Press

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

  Yves Saint Laurent

  Fashion, Dictator, Concepts

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• The Western approach to reality is mostly through theory, and theory begins by denying reality - to talk about reality, to go around reality, to catch anything that attracts our sense-intellect and abstract it away from reality itself. Thus philosophy begins by saying that the outside world is not a basic fact, that its existence can be doubted and that every proposition in which the reality of the outside world is affirmed is not an evident proposition but one that needs to be divided, dissected and analyzed. It is to stand consciously aside and try to square a circle.

  Bruce Lee

  Philosophy, Reality, Squares

  "Striking Thoughts: Bruce Lee's Wisdom for Daily Living". Book edited by John Little, pp. 15 - 16, 2000.

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• Community is another such phenomenon. Like electricity, it is profoundly lawful. Yet there remains something about it that is inherently mysterious, miraculous, unfathomable. Thus there is no adequate one-sentence definition of genuine community. Community is something more than the sum of its parts, its individual members. What is this "something more?" Even to begin to answer that, we enter a realm that is not so much abstract as almost mystical. It is a realm where words are never fully suitable and language itself falls short.

  M. Scott Peck

  Fall, Community, Answers

  M. Scott Peck (2010). “The Different Drum: Community Making and Peace”, p.60, Simon and Schuster

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• Critical (i.e., separating) methods apply only to the world-as-nature. It would be easier to break up a theme of Beethoven with dissecting knife or acid than to break up the soul by methods of abstract thought . Nature-knowledge and man-knowledge have neither ways nor aims in common.

  Oswald Spengler

  Men, Knives, Soul

  Oswald Spengler, Charles Francis Atkinson (1932). “The Decline of the West”

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• Pot is great for the abstract, for when you don't have to be regimented and for when you don't need parameters. When you're creating a song, there should never be any parameters, so being high is okay because your mind can wander all over the place.

  Steve "Lips" Kudlow

  Song, Creating, Mind

  Source: www.huffingtonpost.com

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• I wore one of my Tanguy earrings and one made by Calder in order to show my impartiality between Surrealist and Abstract Art.

  Peggy Guggenheim

  Art, Order, Made

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• Art has to be incredibly layered. Symbols, signifiers... layers that relate. Combine signifiers with more abstract notions. Push! Vary lines.

  Kay WalkingStick

  Art, Lines, Layers

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• But no one, when you stop to think, has ever equated abstract expressionism as a movement with jazz music. It's based on improvisation. The rhythms, the personal involvement, all of this is part of the jazz experience.

  Romare Bearden

  Thinking, Movement, Jazz

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• The shapes we are creating are not abstract, they are absolute. They are released from any already existant thing in nature and their content lies in themselves.

  Naum Gabo

  Nature, Lying, Creating

  Naum Gabo (2000). “Gabo on Gabo: Texts and Interviews”

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• It is the fertile hallucination that makes paint so compelling. Paint is like the numerologist's numbers, always counting but never adding up, always speaking but never saying anything rational, always playing at being abstract but never leaving the clotted body.

  James Elkins

  Play, Numbers, Leaving

  James Elkins (2004). “What Painting Is”, p.49, Routledge

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

  Robert Reynolds

  Strong, Believe, Painting

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• I'm interested in color belonging to something, where it takes on a completely new kind of vibrancy, rather than being what you would call straight abstract paintings. And anyway it is so much more exciting trying to find out about the three dimensions of color and sticking it down on a two dimensional surface.

  Euan Uglow

  Color, Two, Trying

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• Maybe I was a little jealous or envious of the abstract painters - but the truth was I thought what they were doing was boring.

  Larry Rivers

  Jealousy, Littles, Boring

  Larry Rivers, Marlborough Gallery (2005). “Larry Rivers: paintings and drawings: 1951-2001 ; May 3-June 4, 2005”, Marlborough Gallery

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• Art comes into being in that abstract interval between a thought and reality, and no one - not even the artist who created it - can remeasure the influences that caused it.

  Edgar Alwin Payne

  Art, Reality, Influence

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• Philosophers are not honest enough in their work, although they make a lot of virtuous noise when the problem of truthfulness is touched even remotely. They all pose as if they had discovered and reached their real opinions through the self-development of a cold, pure, divinely unconcerned dialectic...; while at bottom it is an assumption, a hunch, indeed a kind of "inspiration" most often a desire of the heart that has been filtered and made abstract that they defend with reasons they have sought after the fact.

  Friedrich Nietzsche

  Real, Philosophy, Inspiration

  "Beyond Good and Evil". Book by Friedrich Nietzsche, Part One: On the Prejudices of Philosophers, §5., 1886.

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• No matter how much a young man likes to think for himself, he is always trying to model himself on some abstract pattern largely derived from the example of the world around him. And a man, no matter how conservative, shows his own worth by his personal deviation from that pattern.

  Cesare Pavese

  Men, Thinking, Always Trying

  Cesare Pavese, Alma Elizabeth Murch (1961). “This Business of Living”, p.131, Transaction Publishers

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