Abstract Quotes - Page 27

• If I had to choose between the two ways of approaching the deity, I should prefer the existential relational way, to the abstract philosophical way. I think it is truer, or in any case, less misleading, to say that God is an old Jew with a white beard whom I love, than to say that God is the ground of being and meaning, or to say that God is a name denoting the ultimate mystery. I prefer the bold primitive colors of the Biblical way of describing God.

  Frank Moore Cross

  Philosophical, Biblical, Thinking

  Source: www.biblicalarchaeology.org

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• Radical activists can't ignore the fact that we live in this world, like it or not, and have to make difficult decisions about which paths are the best - or sometimes, the least harmful. There are no abstract formulas. Have to think through each case on its own.

  Noam Chomsky

  Thinking, Decision, World

  Source: thefifthcolumnnews.com

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• I have written occasionally on links between my scientific work and political thinking, but not much, because the links seem to me abstract and speculative.

  Noam Chomsky

  Thinking, Political, Links

  Source: libcom.org

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• From the very beginning, I said there are two tracks of reform: there's the political and the technical. I don't believe the political will be successful, for exactly the reasons you underlined. The issue is too abstract for average people, who have too many things going on in their lives.

  Edward Snowden

  Believe, Successful, Average

  Source: www.thenation.com

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• I went to the Mary Lee Burbank School in Belmont. And it was a place where you, like, learned to go to the store? And I was saying, Oh God, I want to learn something else. I wanted to learn to read and write better and do mathematics better. They were very much into Abstract Expressionism and that artsy stuff. And where most kids did what I call meaningless blobs, I could render perfectly.

  Paul Laffoley

  Kids, Writing, School

  Source: www.paranoiamagazine.com

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• I would be constantly brought up on the carpet by these teachers who were brought up with Abstract Expressionism, saying, "You're too uptight, you're not expressing yourself, why don't you feel freer?" I said, "Well, I don't like that stuff. It means nothing to me."

  Paul Laffoley

  Teacher, Mean, Would Be

  Source: www.paranoiamagazine.com

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• Theatrical times are different from concert times, to put it simply. Taking a figure like [Mahatma] Gandhi and setting him on a stage requires thinking about what theater is about and what the whole experience is about and what we're trying to communicate in that way, so you get into certain less abstract considerations.

  Philip Glass

  Thinking, Trying, Way

  Source: thomasmoore.info

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• I saw money becoming more and more important everywhere. It's one of the most abstract and important inventions by human beings. At the same time, money is capable of extraordinary corruption in every kind of relationship.

  Costa-Gavras

  Important, Saws, Becoming

  Source: www.progressive.org

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• I've worked in the factories of this land, and I've thought freely and creatively. And I think that that has greatly enriched my capacity to abstract intellectually. The experience of being with workers, my encounters with management and my recognition of its foibles, my personal encounters with American industrial efficiency, my military experience - all of these things packaged together have greatly enriched my reading and my understanding, and I've written with what I hope is a reasonable fluency of style that is much more expressive than the academic stuff.

  Murray Bookchin

  Military, Reading, Thinking

  Interview with Jeff Riggenbach, reason.com. October 1979.

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• Let's talk about the artist's desire to go beyond the pictorial or the representational and the desire to create the abstract - the idea that painting can go beyond what is seen. What we found is that, increasingly, painting became about paint, its own material truth. When I'm talking about the way that we look at others and the way that we see ourselves increasingly, looking at others becomes its own material truth.

  Kehinde Wiley

  Artist, Talking, Ideas

  Source: www.artpractical.com

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• How do we solve the problem by allowing a number of refugees to return to Israel, allowing a number of refugees to return to the Palestinian state, and allowing a number of refugees to settle, with general compensation, where they want to settle? It is not an abstract problem. It involves four million human beings, and more than fifty years of various sorts of misery. But it is not an insolvable problem. It involves some good will, and a readiness to give up historic myths on both sides.

  Uri Avnery

  Giving Up, Numbers, Israel

  Source: progressive.org

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• I think I've learned a lot about how to make movies, and particularly about how to edit movies by thinking about how similar problems are resolved in other forms. The issues in all forms are the same in an abstract sense, aren't they? Characterization, abstraction, metaphor, passage of time... Whether it's a movie, a novel, a play, or a poem, those issues exist. And each person resolves them differently.

  Frederick Wiseman

  Thinking, Play, Issues

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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• There's a literal track: who says what to whom, what are people wearing, etcetera. And there's the abstract track: what ideas are suggested by the literal. And the real movie takes place in the relationship between the literal and the abstract.

  Frederick Wiseman

  Real, Ideas, People

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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• There is something myopic and stunted in focussing only on the meaning of words and sentences. And this myopia is especially unfortunate when combined with a rather abstract view of a language as a set of elements and rules for combining these. For the result is to divorce enquiry into meaning from attention to the way words - and gestures, facial expressions, rituals and so on - are embedded in practices, in what Wittgenstein called 'the stream of life'.

  David E. Cooper

  Divorce, Expression, Practice

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• I don't think poverty provides that much of an obstacle to education as one thinks. I think the bigger obstacle to education is the fact that it's a very hard thing to do for a first-generation schoolgoer. Because not to have parents at home who can help you, motivate you, is a problem even when the parents are in the abstract very keen on children being educated.

  Amartya Sen

  Children, Home, Thinking

  Source: www.pbs.org

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• I think the most important work that is going on has to do with the search for very general and abstract features of what is sometimes called universal grammar: general properties of language that reflect a kind of biological necessity rather than logical necessity; that is, properties of language that are not logically necessary for such a system but which are essential invariant properties of human language and are known without learning. We know these properties but we don't learn them. We simply use our knowledge of these properties as the basis for learning.

  Noam Chomsky

  Thinking, Important, Essentials

  Source: chomsky.info

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• You can imagine a different world in which a number of species developed with different genetically determined linguistic systems. It hasn't happened in evolution. What has happened is that one species has developed, and the genetic structure of this species happens to involve a variety of intricate abstract principles of linguistic organization that, therefore, necessarily constrain every language, and, in fact, create the basis for learning language as a way of organizing experience rather than constituting something learned from experience.

  Noam Chomsky

  Organization, Numbers, World

  Source: chomsky.info

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• A lot of abstract painters seem to be doing everything all at once now. And so these different styles are jibing and not so jibing, and they're clashing. But they all seem to be working in their own domain. Whereas back in the '60s, man, it was kind of a dull world. It was a vital world. But it was kind of contained and not too recognized by the public. Now art is absolutely recognized by the public.

  Edward Ruscha

  Art, Men, Style

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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• When I make films I'm very intuitive; I'm instinctive. When you are shooting there's little time to think about abstract ideas, it's about getting things done, getting them right, and trying to channel the energies and get the best of whatever you have on your set. It's only once the film is finished that it's like, "Okay, let's try to figure out what happened." Try to figure out exactly what I did.

  Olivier Assayas

  Thinking, Ideas, Trying

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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• I consider my work non-objective and I think abstract is an abstraction of something, like a landscape. Abstraction means something is abstracted. It relates to something. Non-objective relates to nothing. It has no object.

  Pat Steir

  Mean, Thinking, Landscape

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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• The abstract expressionists had that thing of, subject matter becomes content, content becomes form. And I always thought there was no room for style. I felt with my painting, the style really is the content. The style holds everything together.

  Alex Katz

  Style, Together, Matter

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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• Picasso and Matisse were the guys I wanted to get away from, and cubism is all still lifes. Their paintings are all closed drawings. And still life is a perfect form for that. By the mid-'50s, I sort of dropped the still life. The large picture was a way of getting around them, too. The abstract expressionists were also into the large form because it was a way of getting around Matisse and Picasso. Picasso can't paint big paintings. Matisse didn't bother after a certain point.

  Alex Katz

  Drawing, Perfect, Guy

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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• The inner and outer, the visible and invisible, the abstract and concrete - you've got to get the balance right (not that I do, but it's something to aim for).

  Elaine Equi

  Balance, Invisible, Concrete

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• I met Michael Snow and Stan Brakhage the second day after I arrived, you know. I had never seen or heard of Brakhage. For me, it was a revolution, because I was well educated in film, but American-style experimental film was known to me in the abstract, and I had seen practically nothing. I had seen a film then that Noël Burch had found and was distributing called Echoes of Silence. It was a beautiful film, three hours long. It goes forever and it was in black and white, very grainy, and I saw that film and I thought...it was not New Wave. It was really a new concept of cinema.

  Babette Mangolte

  Beautiful, Black And White, Long

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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• When you start to really travel and you get to these abstract like places in the world, you would see certain people's names. It seemed like we could go anywhere. Like when we went to Afghanistan, you'd see in the dressing room Run DMC's name. Certain rappers are like journey men.

  Ice T

  Running, Journey, Men

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