Abstract Quotes - Page 38

• When we tell our own story, we teach the values that our choices reveal, not as abstract principals, but as our lived experience. We reveal the kind of person we are to the extent that we let others identify with us.

  Marshall Ganz

  Inspirational, Kindness, Choices

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• All paintings start out of a mood, out of a relationship with things or people, out of a complete visual impression. To call this expression abstract seems to me often to confuse the issue. Abstract means literally to draw from or separate. In this sense every artist is abstract . . . a realistic or non-objective approach makes no difference. The result is what counts.

  Richard Diebenkorn

  Mean, Artist, Expression

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• With an abstract idea it is possible to enter into a relation of formal knowledge, to become enthusiastic about it, and perhaps even to put it into practice; but it can never be followed in personal obedience. Christianity without the living Christ is inevitably Christianity without discipleship, and Christianity without discipleship is always Christianity without Christ.

  Dietrich Bonhoeffer

  Practice, Ideas, Christianity

  Dietrich Bonhoeffer (2015). “The Cost of Discipleship”, p.17, SCM Press

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• But harmony is limitation. Thus rightness of limitation is essential for growth of reality. Unlimited possibility and abstract creativity can procure nothing.

  Alfred North Whitehead

  Creativity, Reality, Growth

  Alfred North Whitehead (2011). “Religion in the Making”, p.137, Cambridge University Press

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• Money alone is absolutely good, because it is not only a concrete satisfaction of one need in particular; it is an abstract satisfaction of all.

  Arthur Schopenhauer

  Needs, Satisfaction, Concrete

  Arthur Schopenhauer (2016). “The Wisdom of Life”, p.33, Cosimo Classics

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• The overscaled compositions being produced by so many abstract painters, which are full of movement and use of color, are ideal example, ideal transformations of an entire wall and entire room.... There is no denying that one of the major attractions of these successful large compositions is their structural decorative use in the contemporary scene... That these large canvases can be superbly decorative may not be considered complimentary by some of the artists involved.

  Van Day Truex

  Wall, Successful, Artist

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• How many people become abstract as a way of appearing profound.

  Joseph Joubert

  People, Profound, Way

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• Abstract words are ancient coins whose concrete images in the give and take of talk have worn away with use.

  Julian Jaynes

  Giving, Use, Coins

  Julian Jaynes (2000). “The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind”, p.61, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• I think most people, when they think about the Black Panther Party, they think in very abstract, caricatured terms. They think about black fists in the air, but they don't think about the actual people, and the families, and the relationships.

  Kerry Washington

  Party, Thinking, Air

  "Kerry Washington" by Sam Adams, www.avclub.com. December 09, 2010.

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• Black and White is essentially an abstract way to interpret and transform what one might refer to as reality. My purpose in taking photographs over the past forty years has ultimately been about defining myself. It has been fundamentally a psychological and existential journey.

  Roger Ballen

  Black And White, Past, Journey

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• Existentialism does not offer to the reader the consolations of an abstract evasion: existentialism proposes no evasion. On the contrary, its ethics is experienced in the truth of life, and it then appears as the only proposition of salvation which one can address to men.

  Simone de Beauvoir

  Men, Doe, Addresses

  Martin Heidegger, Simone de Beauvoir, Jean-Paul Sartre (2016). “The Philosophical Library Existentialism Collection: Essays in Metaphysics, The Ethics of Ambiguity, and The Philosophy of Existentialism”, p.134, Open Road Media

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• Raymond Hendler exhibited a group of abstract paintings that displayed rare high spirits. Using a great deal of fresh white, Hendler devised extremely simple symbols which he dispersed felicitously on his shining grounds. These bright, often linear hieroglyphs serve both as pictorial animators-they often flow in winding patterns or like fluent handwriting-and as references to the plentitude of the artist's existence. Gardens and sky and human joy are read in these exceedingly compressed forms.

  Dore Ashton

  Artist, Simple, Garden

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• I began in 1976, with small abstract paintings that allowed me to do what I had never let myself do: put something down at random. And then, of course, I realized that it never can be random. It was all a way of opening a door for me. If I don't know what's coming - that is, if I have no hard-and-fast image, as I have with a photographic original - then arbitrary choice and chance play an important part.

  Gerhard Richter

  Art, Doors, Play

  Gerhard Richter, Dietmar Elger, Hans-Ulrich Obrist (2009). “Gerhard Richter: writings 1961-2007”, Distributed Art Pub Inc

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• The poetic beauty of Davy's mind never seems to have left him. To that circumstance I would ascribe the distinguishing feature in his character, and in his discoveries,-a vivid imagination sketching out new tracts in regions unexplored, for the judgement to select those leading to the recesses of abstract truth.

  Davies Gilbert

  Character, Science, Discovery

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• The knowledge that mankind needs is not the way or principle which has an absolute existence, but the particular truths for here and now and for particular individuals. Absolute truth is imaginary, abstract, vague, without evidence, and cannot be demonstrated.

  Hu Shih

  Truth, Principles, Needs

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• The British are supposed to be particularly averse to intellectuals, a prejudice closely bound up with their dislike of foreigners. Indeed, one important source of this Anglo-Saxon distaste for highbrows and eggheads was the French revolution, which was seen as an attempt to reconstruct society on the basis of abstract rational principles.

  Terry Eagleton

  Important, Principles, Prejudice

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• For twenty-five centuries, Western knowledge has tried to look upon the world. It has failed to understand that the world is not for the beholding. It is for hearing. It is not legible, but audible. Our science has always desired to monitor, measure, abstract, and castrate meaning, forgetting that life is full of noise and that death alone is silent: work noise, noise of man, and noise of beast. Noise bought, sold, or prohibited. Nothing essential happens in the absence of noise.

  Jacques Attali

  Men, Twenties, Essentials

  Jacques Attali (1985). “Noise: The Political Economy of Music”, p.3, Manchester University Press

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• I wanted to be an abstract painter, but I was rotten at it.

  Jenny Holzer

  Rotten, Painter, Wanted

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• I love the idea of leaving some of the original abstract thought in, because the problem is that when you pick up a pen you become a snob, your own worse critic. You edit yourself in a way that is non-creative.

  Glen Hansard

  Editing, Ideas, Creative

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• I had never thought that I would be involved in narrative structures. As a young guy, I was more interested in abstract modeling. But as I got older, I began to see that there was no reason to limit myself to any intellectual or conceptual postulate, when in fact I'm a professional student of music.

  Anthony Braxton

  Narrative Structure, Guy, Intellectual

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• Height, width, and depth are the three phenomena which I must transfer into one plane to form the abstract surface of the picture, and thus to protect myself from the infinity of space.

  Max Beckmann

  Space, Infinity, Depth

  Max Beckmann, Barbara Copeland Buenger (1997). “Self-Portrait in Words: Collected Writings and Statements, 1903-1950”, p.302, University of Chicago Press

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• Describing comic sensibility is near impossible. It's sort of an abstract silliness, that sometimes the joke isn't the star.

  Dana Carvey

  Stars, Impossible, Sometimes

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• Film is abstract, not definite. It is a dream.

  Jacques Audiard

  Dream, Film, Definite

  Interview With Jason Solomons, www.theguardian.com. December 5, 2009.

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• A trilogy is a pretty abstract notion. You can apply it to almost any three things.

  Jonathan Demme

  Three, Trilogies, Notion

  "Neil Young drives a 1956 Crown Vic back in time in Jonathan Demme’s ‘Neil Young: Journeys’" by Chris Kensler, www.foxnews.com. June 18, 2012.

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• I'm a creature of adaptation. I take advantage of the second and the moment. My comedy breathes; it's not really that predictable. I do have a linear style, but other than that, there's a lot of abstract. I just go off on what I'm thinking. I'm not that topical. I like to talk about me and my experiences.

  Tommy Davidson

  Thinking, Style, Comedy

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