Abstract Quotes - Page 4

• On the whole, age comes more gently to those who have some doorway into an abstract world-art, or philosophy, or learning-regions where the years are scarcely noticed and the young and old can meet in a pale truthful light.

  Freya Stark

  Art, Philosophy, Light

  Freya Stark (1964). “The Journey's Echo: Selections”

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• I can't always reach the image in my mind... almost never, in fact... so that the abstract image I create is not quite there, but it gets to the point where I can leave it.

  Chuck Close

  Photography, Mind, Facts

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• Beauty too often sacrifices to fashion. The spirit of fashion is not the beautiful, but the wilful; not the graceful, but the fantastic; not the superior in the abstract, but the superior in the worst of all concretes,-the vulgar.

  Leigh Hunt

  Beauty, Beautiful, Fashion

  Leigh Hunt (1870). “Men, Women, and Books: A Selection of Sketches, Essays, and Critical Memoirs from His Uncollected Prose Writings”, p.164

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• How badly I want that nameless thing! First there must be an idea, a feeling... Maybe it was an abstract idea that you've got to find a symbol for, or maybe it was a concrete form that you have to simplify or distort to meet your ends, but that starting point must pervade the whole.

  Emily Carr

  Ideas, Feelings, Desire

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• Intellectual growth should commence at birth and cease only at death.

  Albert Einstein

  Inspirational, Life, Education

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• The universe is governed by science. But science tells us that we can't solve the equations, directly in the abstract.

  Stephen Hawking

  Mathematical Equations, Solve, Universe

  "Stephen Hawking: 'There is no heaven; it's a fairy story'". Interview with Ian Sample, www.theguardian.com. May 15, 2011.

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• Mankind is divided into rich and poor, into property owners and exploited; and to abstract oneself from this fundamental division; and from the antagonism between poor and rich means abstracting oneself from fundamental facts.

  Joseph Stalin

  Mean, Division, Fundamentals

  Joseph Stalin (1978). “1934-1940”

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• When I examine myself and my methods of thought, I come to the conclusion that the gift of fantasy has meant more to me than any talent for abstract, positive knowledge.

  Albert Einstein

  Inspirational, Positive, Wisdom

  "János: The Story of a Doctor". Book by János Plesch, 1947.

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• It is impossible not to feel stirred at the thought of the emotions of man at certain historic moments of adventure and discovery - Columbus when he first saw the Western shore, Pizarro when he stared at the Pacific Ocean, Franklin when the electric spark came from the string of his kite, Galileo when he first turned his telescope to the heavens. Such moments are also granted to students in the abstract regions of thought, and high among them must be placed the morning when Descartes lay in bed and invented the method of co-ordinate geometry.

  Alfred North Whitehead

  Morning, Ocean, Adventure

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• Of all the arts, abstract painting is the most difficult. It demands that you know how to draw well, that you have a heightened sensitivity for composition and for colors, and that you be a true poet. This last is essential.

  Wassily Kandinsky

  Art, Color, Abstract Painting

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• It [abstract art] should be enjoyed just as music is enjoyed after a while you may like it or you may not.

  Jackson Pollock

  Art, May, Should

  Elizabeth Frank, Jackson Pollock (1983). “Jackson Pollock”, Abbeville Pr

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• While those whom devotion to abstract discussions has rendered unobservant of the facts are too ready to dogmatize on the basis of a few observations.

  Aristotle

  Facts, Devotion, Observation

  On Generation and Corruption Book I, Chapter II

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• One of the weaknesses of much abstract painting is the attempt to substitute the inventions of the intellect for a pristine imaginative conception. The inner life of a human being is a vast and varied realm and does not concern itself alone with stimulating arrangements of color, form and design. The term 'life' as used in art is something not to be held in contempt, for it applies all of its existence, and the province of art is to react to it and not to shun it. Painting will have to deal more fully and less obliquely with life and nature's phenomena before it can again be great.

  Edward Hopper

  Art, Color, Design

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• The force that propels the human spirit on the clear way forward and upward is the abstract spirit.

  Wassily Kandinsky

  Way Forward, Spirit, Force

  1912 'On the Question of Form', in Blaue Reiter Almanac.

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• The test of an abstract picture, for me, is not my first reaction to it, but how long I can stand it hanging on the wall of a room where I am living.

  Bill Vaughan

  Wall, Long, Tests

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• One's mind and the earth are in a constant state of erosion, mental rivers wear away abstract banks, brain waves undermine cliffs of thought, ideas decompose into stones of unknowing, and conceptual crystallizations break apart into deposits of gritty reason.

  Robert Smithson

  Erosion, Ideas, Rivers

  Robert Smithson, Jack D. Flam (1996). “Robert Smithson, the Collected Writings”, p.100, Univ of California Press

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• I paint abstract expressions.

  Billy Zane

  Expression, Paint

  Biography/Personal Quotes, www.imdb.com.

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• We are all hungry and thirsty for concrete images. Abstract art will have been good for one thing: to restore its exact virginity to figurative art.

  Salvador Dali

  Art, Hungry, Thirsty

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• Each department of knowledge passes through three stages. The theoretic stage; the theological stage and the metaphysical or abstract stage.

  Auguste Comte

  Three, Metaphysical, Stage

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• The atmosphere is different in Congress after September 11. Terrorism is no longer an abstract issue, but a real, tangible threat.

  Howard Berman

  Real, Issues, Atmosphere

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• We deliberately used elements from Brazilian music and from African and Asian music. Now people can hear that but then it sounded so abstract, they couldn't hear it.

  Arto Lindsay

  People, Asian, Elements

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• The man of science, like the man of letters, is too apt to view mankind only in the abstract, selecting in his consideration only a single side of our complex and many-sided being.

  James G. Frazer

  Men, Views, Two Sides

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• To say it another way, thinking, however abstract, originates in an embodied subjectivity, at once overdetermined and permeable to contingent events.

  Teresa de Lauretis

  Thinking, Events, Way

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• Man has such a predilection for systems and abstract deductions that he is ready to distort the truth intentionally he is ready to deny the evidence of his senses only to justify his logic.

  Fyodor Dostoevsky

  Men, Logic, Reason

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• Delight at having understood a very abstract and obscure system leads most people to believe in the truth of what it demonstrates.

  Georg C. Lichtenberg

  Believe, People, Delight

  "Aphorisms". Book by Georg Christoph Lichtenberg. Notebook J 77, 1799.

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