Abstract Quotes - Page 26

• If things are too similar, the dialogue is not very interesting. If you put in contrast, big and small, abstract and representational, you set up the possibility of a discourse.

  Michael Craig-Martin

  Interesting, Possibility, Bigs

  Source: www.artzip.org

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• It is rational to choose the right means to your ends to develop very elegant abstract formal theories of rational choice, and then turn these into what look like moral theories. Philosophers tend to be ravished by the formal beauty of such theories, and they don't pay much attention to the fact that our human limitations make them pretty useless in practice, while the simple point about instrumental reasoning is too shallow to be of much real moral interest.

  Allen W. Wood

  Real, Mean, Simple

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• I don't want my generals or my defense secretary or my national-security team to ever feel deploying weapons to kill people as routine or abstract, even if the targets are bad people.

  Barack Obama

  Team, People, Defense

  Source: www.vanityfair.com

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• I was an abstract expressionist before I had seen any abstract expressionist paintings. I started when I was a kid and continued just doing abstract stuff all through high school.

  Dennis Hopper

  School, Kids, Stuff

  Source: interviewswithicons.wordpress.com

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• I didn't see an abstract painting until I was 18, when I went to Vincent Price's house and saw Richard Niebencorn, Wolff, Jackson Pollack. He had an amazing collection. I didn't know people painted abstractly, I thought I was just doing something wholeheartedly.

  Dennis Hopper

  People, House, Saws

  Source: interviewswithicons.wordpress.com

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• The environment is rarely put on tape, or if it is, it's so abstract that most people never realize it. They just don't know what it means. But if you can show it to them, then that's what becomes the main instrument.

  Ry Cooder

  Mean, People, Tape

  Source: www.avclub.com

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• When I'm not working on a children's book, I'm painting abstract paintings. That's probably the most joyous thing for me as an artist. But I do love children's books.

  Mary GrandPre

  Children, Book, Artist

  Source: www.hbook.com

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• Philosophers tend to radically underestimate the distance between abstract principles (such as "reduce suffering") and what it might actually mean for people to act on them.

  Dale Jamieson

  Distance, Mean, People

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• We're not good at noticing slow, steady changes in our environments, our senses are not very acute compared to those of many animals, and we're pretty awful at abstract thought, much less acting on it.

  Dale Jamieson

  Animal, Acting, Awful

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• Malevitch discovered abstraction as an experimental principle that can propel creative work to previously unheard levels of invention; this abstract work allowed much greater levels of creativity.

  Zaha Hadid

  Creativity, Creative, Levels

  Source: www.designboom.com

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• I like it when I can get really abstract.

  Richard McGuire

  Get Real, I Can

  Source: www.gq-magazine.co.uk

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• You have to act and this is something that happened in abstract expressionism too, it was a discovery particularly in De Kooning's paintings, great paintings. There's a lot of speed in his work and the speed produces things that only speed can produce.

  Michael Snow

  Discovery, Painting, Speed

  Source: offscreen.com

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• Basically, I have found that people who have tried to start communities out of good feelings or hippie-dippie abstract concepts of love - it doesn't work. But if you just concentrate on what is the identity of your town - its waterfalls, its battles, its notable mill strike or those things - you dig into what your town is from its rock formations to its history to its food. Then this thing called community happens all the time.

  Dar Williams

  Hippie, Rocks, People

  Source: chicago.gopride.com

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• Playing to resentment and using a lot of, you know, grand abstract phrases like make America great again is - it just doesn't have the answer. It's simply a way to whip up emotion and then leave people more bitter than you found them.

  George Packer

  America, People, Phrases

  Source: www.npr.org

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• Telling someone to be confident in the abstract is not going to make it easier for the unconfident writer to actually get herself or himself to the point of being able to put in the upsetting stuff.

  Alice Mattison

  Upset, Able, Stuff

  Source: therumpus.net

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• Even with painting, even abstract paintings, you need the incoming of, light on the canvas.

  Jean-Luc Godard

  Light, Abstract Painting, Needs

  Source: cinemagodardcinema.wordpress.com

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• Cinema is not a series of abstract ideas, but rather the phrasing of moments.

  Jean-Luc Godard

  Ideas, Cinema, Moments

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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• I always say that writing non-fiction versus writing fiction is a bit like architecture versus abstract painting.

  Andrew Lam

  Writing, Abstract Painting, Fiction

  "‘Birds of Paradise Lost’: A Conversation With Author Andrew Lam". Interview with Anna Challet, www.huffingtonpost.com. March 5, 2013.

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• In my case, I was stuck there for quite a while. New York is large enough to be a very abstract city, so nobody cares.

  Ai Weiwei

  New York, Cities, Care

  Interview with Claudine Ko, www.mcsweeneys.net. 2007.

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• Plotinus, when he thinks about mind or intellect, the Greek word is 'nous', he thinks about something that's very different, it's much more elevated and special, more abstract, you might say more philosophical than the very broad range of mental events that we talk about in contemporary philosophy of mind.

  Peter Adamson

  Philosophy, Philosophical, Thinking

  Source: www.abc.net.au

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• You can write very obtuse and abstract lyrics, and if they want to, people are going to find something amazing that you're saying.

  Girl Talk

  Writing, People, Want

  Source: uproxx.com

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• A species has to become pretty intellectually advanced in order to grasp the concept of death in the abstract, and to dream up the idea of immortality. Long before that (in evolutionary terms) all species with brains have the survival instinct in some form. So, I am just saying that there are many existent proofs of species that have one, but not the other.

  Neal Stephenson

  Dream, Ideas, Order

  Source: www.omnivoracious.com

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• I understand that words can mean different things to different people, and, further, that people can have different relationships with complex abstract entities such as Buddhism. To me, anyway, the entity in my life that conflicts with my creativity is Buddhism.

  Quentin S. Crisp

  Mean, Creativity, Buddhism

  Source: www.teemingbrain.com

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• Film relates to almost every other form of expression, but poetry is a bit abstract in its strength and sometimes even the white spaces on the page are evocative almost as much as where the text is. Certain poets have played with that.

  Jim Jarmusch

  Expression, White, Space

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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• Israel defined its God and its relation to that God in existential, relational terms. They did not, until quite late, approach the question of one God in an abstract philosophical way.

  Frank Moore Cross

  Philosophical, Israel, Way

  Source: www.biblicalarchaeology.org

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