Abstract Quotes - Page 39

• When I have a creative block, I take walks. I like to see what shapes stick out - so many legs rushing by at once, it can seem abstract. I don't need to see great art to get stirred up. Music does that for me more easily.

  Caio Fonseca

  Art, Block, Rushing

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• Developing characters is a strange thing. In the beginning they are abstract and I wonder how to move on from there.

  Ann Brashares

  Moving, Character, Strange

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• My work sometimes can be abstract and appear not to have a direct relationship to Afro-American concerns, but, in fact, it is based on that.

  Donald Byrd

  Afros, Facts, Sometimes

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• Americans tend to endorse the use of physician-assisted suicide and euthanasia when the question is abstract and hypothetical.

  Ezekiel Emanuel

  Suicide, Physicians, Use

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• If we can abstract pathogenicity and hygiene from our notion of dirt, we are left with the old definition of dirt as matter out of place. This is a very suggestive approach. It implies two conditions: a set of ordered relations and a contrevention of that order. Dirt then, is never a unique, isolated event. Where there is dirt there is a system. Dirt is the by-product of a systematic ordering and classification of matter, in so far as ordering involves rejecting inappropriate elements.

  Mary Douglas

  Unique, Order, Hygiene

  "Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo". Book by Mary Douglas, 1966.

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• Your words have come true with a vengeance that I shd [should] be forestalled ... I never saw a more striking coincidence. If Wallace had my M.S. sketch written out in 1842 he could not have made a better short abstract! Even his terms now stand as Heads of my Chapters.

  Charles Darwin

  Science, Saws, Vengeance

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• As far as life is concerned, there is no such thing as "Nature". There are only homes. Home is that environment to which the individual has become adapted; and almost everything is unnatural outside his range of adaptation. Harmonious equilibrium with nature is an abstract concept with a Platonic beauty but lacking the flesh and blood of life. It fails, in particular, to convey the creative emergent quality of human existence.

  Rene Dubos

  Life, Home, Blood

  René Jules Dubos (1987). “Mirage of Health: Utopias, Progress, and Biological Change”, p.28, Rutgers University Press

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• Abstract systems depend on trust, yet they provide none of the moral rewards which can be obtained from personalised trust, or were often available in traditional settings from the moral frameworks within which everyday life was undertaken. Moreover, the wholesale penetration of abstract systems into daily life creates risks which the individual is not well placed to confront; high-consequence risks fall into this category. Greater interdependence, up to and including globally independent systems, means greater vulnerability when untoward events occur that affect those systems as a whole.

  Anthony Giddens

  Fall, Mean, Independent

  Anthony Giddens (2013). “Modernity and Self-Identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age”, p.140, John Wiley & Sons

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• Abstract anger is great for rhetorical carrying on. You can go on endlessly about the post office, but it doesn't mean you're mad at your mailman.

  P. J. O'Rourke

  Inspirational, Mean, Office

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• The wars of the future will be fought by computer technicians and by lawyers and high-altitude specialists, and that may mean war will be increasingly abstract, hard to think about and hard to control.

  Michael Ignatieff

  War, Mean, Thinking

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• I like connecting the abstract to the concrete. There's a tension in that. I believe the reader or listener should be able to enter the poem as a participant. So I try to get past resolving poems.

  Yusef Komunyakaa

  Believe, Past, Trying

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• Certainly one of the surprising truths of having a book published is realizing that your book is as open to interpretation as an abstract painting. People bring their own beliefs and attitudes to your work, which is thrilling and surprising at the same time.

  Marisha Pessl

  Attitude, Book, People

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• My guard stood hard when abstract threats, too noble to neglect, deceived me into thinking, I had something to protect.

  Bob Dylan

  Education, Thinking, Noble

  Song: My Back Pages, Album: Another Side Of Bob Dylan

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• I didn't have a regular school experience and wanted a more abstract way of learning. I started exploring in lots of different creative ways. It gave me the opportunity to travel and play music, so it was good for me.

  Brie Larson

  School, Opportunity, Play

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

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• I guess my experience with some stuff is kind of abstract.

  Joaquin Phoenix

  Stuff, Kind

  "Joaquin Phoenix: Before the Letterman Fiasco, There Was This". Interview with Ramin Setoodeh, www.newsweek.com. February 12, 2009.

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• Honest talk about the deficit is risky. Voters are more enthusiastic about the abstract notion of deficit reduction than about the painful details of accomplishing it.

  Christina Romer

  Details, Voters, Honest

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• To really be on stage and not know what you're going to say, and to be able to say something that makes people laugh, or do something that's sort of abstract or off the beaten path and have people connect to it by just putting your ideas together, that really makes me happy.

  Mary Lynn Rajskub

  Ideas, Off The Beaten Path, People

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• I want Pinterest to be human. The Internet's still so abstract... To me, boards are a very human way of looking at the world.

  Ben Silbermann

  Way, Boards, World

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• A story is a way to say something that can't be said any other way, and it takes every word in the story to say what the meaning is. You tell a story because a statement would be inadequate. When anybody asks what a story is about, the only proper thing is to tell them to read the story. The meaning of fiction is not abstract meaning but experienced meaning.

  Flannery O'Connor

  Writing, Would Be, Fiction

  Flannery O'Connor (1969). “Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose”, p.96, Macmillan

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• I admire the abstract expressionists and pop artists so right now I'm referencing American '60s art and at the same time referencing Japanese manga culture.

  Christian Marclay

  Art, Culture, Referencing

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• Love is like that, fragile and light. No wonder it rests upon our hearts in intangible moments, bids us follow fleeting thoughts and ideas and pursue our abstract imaginings.

  Belinda Peregrin

  Heart, Love Is, Light

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• We can hardly say that the Pharisees had an accurate ‘knowledge’ of man when they pointed to the sins (the real sins) of publicans and sinners. This judgment, which separated knowledge of man from self-knowledge, was as nothing in God’s eyes. The Jew did not have a better understanding because he was able to judge the heathen. In the sphere of abstract morality this could possibly be said, but this is not Biblical morality - O man, who judgest others!

  G. C. Berkouwer

  Real, Eye, Biblical

  G. C. Berkouwer (1962). “Man: The Image of God”, p.27, Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing

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• For Singapore, its test for its own democracy must be whether it fit and serve the interests of its people and conditions, and not serve some abstract ideal that the Western media thought it ought to conform to. If in 10 years, Philippines, Taiwan and Korea were better societies because they adopted the US model, Singapore would hurry to catch.

  Goh Chok Tong

  Media, Korea, Years

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• I’ve always assumed that the abstract qualities of [my] photographs are obvious. For instance, I can turn them upside down and they’re still interesting to me as pictures. If you turn a picture that’s not well organized upside down, it won’t work.

  William Eggleston

  Interesting, Quality, Down And

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• The Analytical Engine might act upon other things besides number, were objects found whose mutual fundamental relations could be expressed by those of the abstract science of operations, and which should be also susceptible of adaptations to the action of the operating notation and mechanism of the engine… Supposing, for instance, that the fundamental relations of pitched sounds in the science of harmony and of musical composition were susceptible of such expression and adaptations, the engine might compose elaborate and scientific pieces of music of any degree of complexity or extent.

  Ada Lovelace

  Expression, Numbers, Musical

  "Sketch of the Analytical Engine Invented by Charles Babbage". Book by L.F. Menabrea. Scientific Memoirs (Richard Taylor): 694, 1842.

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