Abstract Quotes - Page 34

• A hideous ecstasy of fear and vindictiveness, a desire to kill, to torture, to smash faces in with a sledge hammer, seemed to flow through the whole group of people like an electric current, turning one even against one's will into a grimacing, screaming lunatic. And yet the rage that one felt was an abstract, undirected emotion which could be switched from one object to another like the flame of a blowlamp.

  George Orwell

  Flames, People, Desire

  George Orwell (1961). “1984”

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• In the abstract art of cooking, ingredients trump appliances, passion supersedes expertise, creativity triumphs over technique, spontaneity inspires invention, and wine makes even the worst culinary disaster taste delicious.

  Bob Blumer

  Art, Passion, Wine

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• I know the stars are my home. I learned about them, needed them for survival in terms of navigation. I know where I am when I look up at the sky. I know where I am when I look up at the Moon; it's not just some abstract romantic idea, it's something very real to me. See, I've expanded my home.

  Gene Cernan

  Stars, Real, Home

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• The biggest adversary in our life is ourselves. We are what we are, in a sense, because of the dominating thoughts we allow to gather in our head. All concepts of self-improvement, all actions and paths we take, relate solely to our abstract image of ourselves. Life is limited only by how we really see ourselves and feel about our being. A great deal of pure self-knowledge and inner understanding allows us to lay an all-important foundation for the structure of our life from which we can perceive and take the right avenues.

  Bruce Lee

  Self, Understanding, Important

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• Genuine trust involves allowing another to matter and have an impact in our lives. For that reason, many who hate and do battle with God trust Him more deeply than those whose complacent faith permits an abstract and motionless stance before Him. Those who trust God most are those whose faith permits them to risk wrestling with Him over the deepest questions of life. Good hearts are captured in a divine wrestling match; fearful, doubting hearts stay clear of the mat.

  Dan B. Allender

  Good Life, Hate, Heart

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• Revenge is a particularly interesting concept, especially the notion of whether or not it exists outside of just an abstract idea.

  Christopher Nolan

  Revenge, Ideas, Interesting

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• Condemnation by category is the lowest form of hatred, for it is cold-hearted and abstract, lacking even the courage of a personal hatred.

  Wendell Berry

  Hatred, Cold Hearted, Condemnation

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• The body, the mind, and the spirit don't form a pyramid, they form a circle. Each of them runs into the other two. The body isn't below the mind and the spirit; from the point of view it's between them. if you reside too much in the mind, then you get too abstract and cut off from the world. You long for the spiritual life, but you can't get to it, and you fall into despair. The exercise of the senses frees you from abstraction and opens the way to transcendence.

  Jane Smiley

  Running, Spiritual, Fall

  Jane Smiley (2017). “Moo”, p.216, Pan Macmillan

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• All good art is abstract in its structure.

  Paul Strand

  Art, Structure, Art Is

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• Up until 35 I had a slightly skewed world view. I honestly believed everybody in the world wanted to make abstract paintings, and people only became lawyers and doctors and brokers and things because they couldn't make abstract paintings

  Frank Stella

  Artist, Doctors, Views

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• The more horrible this world (as today, for instance), the more abstract our art, whereas a happy world brings forth an art of the here and now.

  Paul Klee

  Art, World, Today

  Paul Klee (2012). “Paul Klee”, p.119, Parkstone International

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

  Robert Rauschenberg

  Sorry, Order, Feels

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• My art is not abstract, it lives and breathes

  Mark Rothko

  Art, Breathe, Art Is

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• 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 the body, nor does it worry you like the tiredness of knowledge and emotion. It's a weightiness of the conscience of the world, an inability of the soul to breathe.

  Fernando Pessoa

  Worry, Soul, Inability

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• Justice-august and pure, the abstract idea of all that would be perfect in the spirits and the inspirations of men!-where the mind rises; where the heart expands; where the countenance is ever placid and benign; where her favorite attitude is to stoop to the unfortunate; to hear their cry and to help them; to rescue and relieve; to succor and save; majestic, from its mercy; venerable, from its Lutility; uplifted, without pride; firm without obduracy; beneficent in each preference; lovely, though in her frown!

  Richard Brinsley Sheridan

  Attitude, Inspiration, Heart

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• Stated as an English sentence, of course, this is just a banal platitude - but the fact is that, in the day-to-day trenches of adult existence, banal platitudes can have life-or-death importance. That may sound like hyperbole, or abstract nonsense.

  David Foster Wallace

  Sound, Adults, May

  "'Plain Old Untrendy Troubles and Emotions'". www.theguardian.com. September 19, 2008.

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• Probably the most dangerous thing about college education, at least in my own case, is that it enables my tendency to over-intellectualize stuff, to get lost in abstract arguments inside my head instead of simply paying attention to what's going on right in front of me. TC mark

  David Foster Wallace

  College, Attention, Stuff

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• Spiritual superiority only sees the individual. But alas, ordinarily we human beings are sensual and, therefore, as soon as it is a gathering, the impression changes - we see something abstract, the crowd, and we become different. But in the eyes of God, the infinite spirit, all the millions that have lived and now live do not make a crowd, He only sees each individual.

  Soren Kierkegaard

  Life, Spiritual, Eye

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• Love, he told himself, was open to interpretation like any other abstract indulgence but followed the same principles everywhere, irrespective of everything else. One, either won or lost in love, there was no bridge in between, and he decided he had lost, lost to himself, if not to her.

  Faraaz Kazi

  Love, Bridges, Principles

  Faraaz Kazi (2012). “Truly, Madly, Deeply!: Memoirs of a Broken Heart's First Love!”, p.96, Faraaz Kazi

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• Abstract ideas are the patterns two or more memories have in common.

  Rudolf Flesch

  Memories, Ideas, Two

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• Arithmetic has a very great and elevating effect, compelling the soul to reason about abstract number, and rebelling against the introduction of visible or tngible objects into the argument.

  Plato

  Plato, Numbers, Soul

  Plato, Julius A. Sigler (1997). “Education: Ends and Means”, p.24, University Press of America

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• The real test of compassion is not what we say in abstract discussions but how we conduct ourselves in daily life.

  Dalai Lama

  Real, Hero, Compassion

  Dalai Lama, Anne Benson, Fabien Ouaki (2016). “Imagine All the People: A Conversation with the Dalai Lama on Money, Politics, and Life As It Could Be”, p.122, Simon and Schuster

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• For many people during many centuries, mankind's history before the coming of Christianity was the history of the Jews and what they recounted of the history of others. Both were written down in the books called the Old Testament, [the Torah] the sacred writings of the Jewish people ... They were the first to arrive at an abstract notion of God and to forbid his representation by images. No other people has produced a greater historical impact from such comparatively insignificant origins and resources.

  John Roberts

  Book, Writing, Impact

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• If sustainability is going to take hold in the corporate sector in a big way - and we need it to - it will be when it produces big profits and faster growth. It won't happen because of an optional executive commitment to an abstract concept. It will happen because sustainability is a great business strategy. And it is

  Paul Gilding

  Business, Commitment, Growth

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• It is only through fiction and the dimension of the imaginary that we can learn something real about individual experience. Any other approach is bound to be general and abstract.

  Nicola Chiaromonte

  Real, Fiction, Dimensions

  Nicola Chiaromonte (1985). “The paradox of history: Stendhal, Tolstoy, Pasternak, and others”, Univ of Pennsylvania Pr

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