Abstract Quotes - Page 8

• Abstract art is a fundamental distrust of the theory of reality concocted by the eyes.

  Robert Breault

  Art, Eye, Reality

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• The only and one way to say what abstract art or art-as-art is, is to say what it is not.

  Ad Reinhardt

  Way, Abstraction

  "Art-as-art: The Selected Writings of Ad Reinhardt".

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• Iconic clothing has been secularized. . . . A guardsman in a dress uniform is ostensibly an icon of aggression; his coat is red as the blood he hopes to shed. Seen on a coat-hanger, with no man inside it, the uniform loses all its blustering significance and, to the innocent eye seduced by decorative colour and tactile braid, it is as abstract in symbolic information as a parasol to an Eskimo. It becomes simply magnificent.

  Angela Carter

  Hope, Eye, Men

  Angela Carter (1998). “Shaking a Leg: Collected Writings”, Penguin Group USA

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• Every three minutes a woman is being raped. Every eighteen seconds a woman is being beaten. There is nothing abstract about it. It is happening right now as I am speaking.

  Andrea Dworkin

  Three, Minutes, Happenings

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• Prefer the familiar word to the far-fetched. Prefer the concrete word to the abstract. Prefer the single word to the circumlocution. Prefer the short word to the long. Prefer the Saxon word to the Romance.

  Henry Watson Fowler

  Long, Romance, Concrete

  Henry Watson Fowler, Francis George Fowler (1931). “The King's English”, Oxford University Press

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• Movement, or physical activity, is thus an essential factor in intellectual growth, which depends upon the impressions received from outside. Through movement we come in contact with external reality, and it is through these contacts that we eventually acquire even abstract ideas.

  Maria Montessori

  Reality, Ideas, Intellectual

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• This system in which a child is constantly moving objects with his hands and actively exercising his senses, also takes into account a child's special aptitude for mathematics. When they leave the material, the children very easily reach the point where they wish to write out the operation. They can thus carryout an abstract mental operation and acquire a kind of natural and spontaneous inclination for mental calculations.

  Maria Montessori

  Children, Moving, Writing

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• We speak of concrete and not abstract painting because nothing is more concrete, more real than a line, a color, a surface.

  Theo van Doesburg

  Art, Real, Color

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• Abstract understanding doesn't mean arbitrary sloshing and messing. Abstract art is controlled visual magic based on laws and methodology. Abstraction generally involves implication, suggestion and mystery rather that obvious description. Like a good poem, a good abstraction attacks your feelings before your understanding. Abstraction within realism adds zest and excitement to otherwise dull subject matter. Abstract understanding takes time and patience.

  Robert Genn

  Art, Mean, Zest

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• What persuades men and women to mistake each other from time to time for gods or vermin is ideology. One can understand well enough how human beings may struggle and murder for good material reasons - reasons connected, for instance, with their physical survival. It is much harder to grasp how they may come to do so in the name of something as apparently abstract as ideas. Yet ideas are what men and women live by, and will occasionally die for.

  Terry Eagleton

  Mistake, Struggle, Men

  Terry Eagleton (1991). “Ideology: An Introduction”, p.13, Verso

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• Nothing as drastic an innovation as abstract art could have come in to existence, save as the consequence of a most profound, relentless, unquenchable need. The need is for felt experience - intense, immediate, direct, subtle, unified, warm, vivid, rhythmic.

  Robert Motherwell

  Art, Profound, Innovation

  Robert Motherwell (1999). “The Collected Writings of Robert Motherwell”

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• Pop is everything art hasn't been for the last two decades...It springs newborn out of a boredom with the finality and over-saturation of Abstract-Expressionism, which, by its own esthetic logic, is the END of art, the glorious pinnacle of the long pyramidal creative process. Stifled by this rarefied atmosphere, some young painters turn back to some less exalted things like Coca-Cola, ice-cream sodas, big hamburgers, super-markets and 'EAT' signs. They are eye-hungry; they pop.

  Robert Indiana

  Art, Spring, Eye

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• To tell the truth, in Pacific 231 I was on the trail of a very abstract and quite ideal concept, by giving the impression of a mathematical acceleration of rhythm, while the movement itself slowed .  I first called this piece Mouvement symphonique. On reflection I found that a bit colorless. Suddenly, a rather romantic image crossed my mind, and when the work was finished, I wrote the title Pacific 231, which indicates a locomotive for heavy loads and high speeds (a type unfortunately disappeared, alas, and sacrificed to electric traction).

  Arthur Honegger

  Reflection, Giving, Mind

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• The physical world is entirely abstract and without actuality apart from its linkage to consciousness.

  Arthur Eddington

  World, Consciousness, Linkages

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• You cannot be present in an abstract way. Presence is not about disappearing into nothingness. You can only be present with something that is actually here.

  Leonard Jacobson

  Awakening, Way, Disappear

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• There is no abstract Evil; you have to understand that! Its roots are here, all around us, in this herd that goes on chewing and having a good time only an hour after a murder! That's what you have to fight for. For people. Evil is a hydra with many heads, and the more of them you cut off, the more it grows! Hydras have to be starved to death, do you understand that? Kill a hundred Dark Ones, and a thousand more will take their place.

  Sergei Lukyanenko

  Fighting, Cutting, Dark

  Sergei Lukyanenko (2006). “Night Watch”, Miramax

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• At a time when threats to the physical environment have never been greater, it may be tempting to believe that people need to be mounting the barricades rather than asking abstract questions about the human place in nature. Yet without confronting such questions, it will be hard to know which barricades to mount, and harder still to persuade large numbers of people to mount them with us. To protect the nature that is all around us, we must think long and hard about the nature we carry inside our heads.

  William Cronon

  Believe, Thinking, Numbers

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• The emotional, physical and aesthetic value of a sound is linked not only to the causal explanation we attribute to it but also to its own qualities of timbre and texture, to its own personal vibration. So just as directors and cinematographers (even those who will never make abstract films) have everything to gain by refining their knowledge of visual materials and textures, we can similarly benefit from disciplined attention to the inherent qualities of sounds.

  Michel Chion

  Emotional, Quality, Gains

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• The greatest cost of the specialization of technological life - and out of which all other damages are birthed - is arguably our separation from the practical and enriching sense of ourselves as embodied beings. When we are alienated from the wisdom of the body, our lives become theoretical and abstract, and we are distanced from the direct, felt sense of living.

  Richard Strozzi-Heckler

  Life, Damage, Cost

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• Talk with M. Hermite. He never evokes a concrete image, yet you soon perceive that the more abstract entities are to him like living creatures.

  Henri Poincare

  Life, Math, Evoke

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• . . . Luddites were those frenzied traditionalists of the early 19th century who toured [England] wrecking new weaving machines on the theory that if they were destroyed . . . old jobs and old ways of life could be preserved . . . At certain times in his life each man is tempted to become a Luddite, for there is always something he would like to go back to. But to be against all change-against change in the abstract-is folly.

  James A. Michener

  Life, Jobs, Men

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• When you fight, you don't fight for abstract values like the flag, or the nation, or democracy. You fight for your buddy. You fight to keep him alive, and he fights to keep you alive, and you go on that way, day after day, battle after battle. And when one of your buddies dies, something inside you dies as well. But you go on. You fight, so that his death isn't meaningless, his sacrifice isn't for nothing.

  Richard Marcinko

  Death, Sacrifice, Fighting

  Richard Marcinko (2010). “Red Cell”, p.323, Simon and Schuster

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• This attitude [the abstract method in mathematics] can be encapsulated in the following slogan: a mathematical object is what it does.

  Timothy Gowers

  Attitude, Learning, Doe

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• The lover heals the world not by a vague and abstract love for everybody and everything, but by becoming passionate and vowing fidelity to concrete relationships, persons, institutions, and places.

  Sam Keen

  Love, Healing, Becoming

  Sam Keen (1992). “The passionate life: stages of loving”, Harper San Francisco

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• Sometimes it happens that the computer's assessment is very abstract. It's correct, but it's not useful for a practical game. You have to prove the assessment with very strong moves and if you don't find all of these strong moves you may lose very quickly. For a computer this is not a problem, but for humans it is not so easy.

  Vassily Ivanchuk

  Strong, Moving, Assessment

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