Abstract Quotes - Page 35

• (The festival) was awfully impersonal and abstract and there was something really gloomy about it. That's when I first started thinking about the typical view of reality.

  Thomas Cahill

  Reality, Thinking, Views

  "Thomas Cahill's mission: to restore the West's genealogy" by Jamie Allen, www.cnn.com. November 27, 1998.

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• Once you abstract from this, once you generalize and postulate Universals, you have departed from the creative reality, and entered the realm of static fixity, mechanism, materialism.

  D. H. Lawrence

  Reality, Creative, Departed

  D.H. Lawrence (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of D.H. Lawrence (Illustrated)”, p.9091, Delphi Classics

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• I have always taken as the standard of the mode of teaching and writing, not the abstract, particular, professional philosopher, but universal man, that I have regarded man as the criterion of truth, and not this or that founder of a system, and have from the first placed the highest excellence of the philosopher in this, that he abstains, both as a man and as an author, from the ostentation of philosophy, i. e., that he is a philosopher only in reality, not formally, that he is a quiet philosopher, not a loud and still less a brawling one.

  Ludwig Feuerbach

  Philosophy, Teaching, Taken

  "The Essence of Christianity". Book by Ludwig Feuerbach (1841), Preface to Second Edition, 1843.

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• What if angry vectors veer Round your sleeping head, and form. There's never need to fear Violence of the poor world's abstract storm.

  Robert Penn Warren

  Fear, Sleep, Math

  Robert Penn Warren, John Burt (1998). “The Collected Poems of Robert Penn Warren”, p.128, LSU Press

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• The man who knows governments most completely is he who troubles himself least about a definition which shall give their essence. Enjoying an intimate acquaintance with all their particularities in turn, he would naturally regard an abstract conception in which these were unified as a thing more misleading than enlightening.

  William James

  Men, Essence, Giving

  William James (2015). “The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature”, p.13, Xist Publishing

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• Ballet is not just movement, not simply abstract. It's something beautiful. Sometimes there's this feeling in the movement that makes me want to cry.

  Nina Ananiashvili

  Beautiful, Ballet, Feelings

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• I thought of a labyrinth of labyrinths, of one sinuous spreading labyrinth that would encompass the past and the future . . . I felt myself to be, for an unknown period of time, an abstract perceiver of the world.

  Jorge Luis Borges

  Past, Labyrinth, World

  Jorge Luis Borges, Donald A. Yates, James East Irby (1964). “Labyrinths: Selected Stories & Other Writings”, p.23, New Directions Publishing

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• When, for example, in the name of non-discrimination, people try to force the Catholic Church to change her position on homosexuality or the ordination of women, then that means that she is no longer allowed to live out her own identity and that, instead, an abstract, negative religion is being made into a tyrannical standard that everyone must follow. That is then seemingly freedom — for the sole reason that it is liberation from the previous situation.

  Pope Benedict XVI

  Mean, Names, People

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• The spirit listens only when the speaker speaks in gestures. And gestures do not mean signs or body movements, but acts of true abandon, acts of largesse, of humor. As a gesture to the spirit, warriors bring out the best of themselves and silently offer it to the abstract.

  Carlos Castaneda

  Mean, Warrior, Movement

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• For what reason then do the realists show themselves so unfriendly toward philosophy? Because they misunderstand their own calling and with all their might want to remain restricted instead of becoming unrestricted! Why do they hate abstractions? Because they themselves are abstract since they abstract from the perfection of themselves, from the elevation of redeeming truth!

  Max Stirner

  Hate, Philosophy, Perfection

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• It is the transcendent (or 'abstract' or 'self-contained') nature of music that the new so called concretism--Pop Art, eighteen-hour slices-of-reality films, musique concrete--opposes. But instead of bringing art and reality closer together, the new movement merely thins out the distinction.

  Igor Stravinsky

  Art, Reality, Self

  Igor Stravinsky, Robert Craft (1969). “Retrospectives and Conclusions”

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• How can you say one style is better than another? You ought to be able to be an Abstract Expressionist next week, or a Pop artist, or a realist, without feeling you've given up something.. I think that would be so great, to be able to change styles. And I think that's what's is going to happen, that's going to be the whole new scene.

  Andy Warhol

  Artist, Thinking, Next Week

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• My father was a proctologist and my mother was an abstract artist, so that's how I view the world.

  Sandra Bernhard

  Mother, Father, Artist

  "Biography/ Personal Quotes". www.imdb.com.

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• He [Professor Moriarty] is the Napoleon of crime, Watson. He is the organizer of half that is evil and of nearly all that is undetected in this great city. He is a genius, a philosopher, an abstract thinker. He has a brain of the first order.

  Arthur Conan Doyle

  Order, Cities, Evil

  "The Final Problem" (1893)

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• Human intellect is incurably abstract.

  C. S. Lewis

  Intellect, Humans

  C. S. Lewis (2014). “God in the Dock”, p.57, Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing

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• Far be it for me to have worked it out in any abstract way. I don't know why the bull and Mrs. May have to die, or why Mr. Fortune and Mary Fortune: I just feel in my bones that that is the way it has to be. If I had the abstraction first I don't suppose I would write the story.

  Flannery O'Connor

  Writing, Empathy, Apathy

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• Whatever is most abstract may perhaps be the summit of reality.

  Pablo Picasso

  Reality, Simplicity, May

  Pablo Picasso (1972). “Picasso on art: a selection of views”, Viking Adult

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• The man who works recognizes his own product in the world that has actually been transformed by his work. He recognizes himself in it, he sees his own human reality in it he discovers and reveals to others the objective reality of his humanity of the originally abstract and purely subjective idea he has of himself

  Alexandre Kojeve

  Reality, Men, Ideas

  Alexandre Kojève (1980). “Introduction to the Reading of Hegel”, p.27, Cornell University Press

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• I try to make concrete that which is abstract.

  Juan Gris

  Trying, Concrete

  Response to questionnaire circulated to the Cubists by Amédée Ozenfant and Le Corbusier, editors of "L'Esprit Nouveau" # 5, February 1921.

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• There is very little moral mixture in the 'Antislavery' feeling of this country. A great deal is abstract philanthropy; part is hatred of slaveholders; a great part is jealousy for white labor, very little is consciousness of wrong done and the wish to right it.

  George William Curtis

  Country, War, White

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• I've always said that I expected to grow up and get married like any nice southern girl, but the fact is you don't get married in the abstract. You find someone that you'd like to be married to.

  Condoleezza Rice

  Marriage, Girl, Growing Up

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• It is fairly easy to grasp abstract moral principles; it can be very difficult to apply them to a given situation, particularly when it involves the moral character of another person.

  Ayn Rand

  Character, Principles, Moral

  Ayn Rand (1988). “The Ayn Rand Lexicon: Objectivism from A to Z”, p.319, Penguin

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• By phonemic trans-formation into visual terms, the alphabet became a universal, abstract, static container of meaningless sounds.

  Marshall McLuhan

  Media, Sound, Alphabet

  "Laws of Media: The New Science". Book by Marshall McLuhan, p. 15, 1988.

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• Blue has no dimensions, it is beyond dimensions, whereas the other colours are not....All colours arouse specific associative ideas, psychologically material or tangible, while blue suggests at most the sea and sky, and they, after all, are in actual, visible nature what is most abstract.

  Yves Klein

  Art, Blue, Color

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• A mobile is an abstract sculpture made chiefly out of sheet metal, steel rods, wire and wood. Some or all of these elements move, propelled by electric motors, wind, water or by hand.

  Alexander Calder

  Moving, Electric Motors, Hands

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