Abstraction Quotes - Page 19

• I'm not a person who writes really abstract things with oblique references. I look at abstraction like I look at condiments. Give me some Tabasco sauce, some ketchup, some mayonnaise. I love all of that. Put it on a trumpet. I've just got to have the ketchup and Tabasco sauce. That's my attitude about musical philosophy.

  Wynton Marsalis

  Attitude, Philosophy, Writing

  52 Copy quote
• 

  Men do not fight for flag or country, for the Marine Corps or glory or any other abstraction. They fight for one another. And if you came through this ordeal, you would age with dignity.

  William Manchester

  Country, Fighting, Marine

  66 Copy quote

• To me, a story can be both concrete and abstract, or a concrete story can hold abstractions. And abstractions are things that really can't be said so well with words.

  David Lynch

  Stories, Abstract, Said

  8 Copy quote

• I felt like my parents were always involved with abstraction, and I wanted to do something very specific.

  Lena Dunham

  Parent, Wanted, Felt

  4 Copy quote

• I think there's something really painful about your identity being entirely composed of ghosts. For me, I didn't want to be this kid whose Dominicanness was something caught utterly in the past, is an abstraction, the thing that I write about. Instead I wanted it to be, first and foremost, a thing that I lived.

  Junot Diaz

  Writing, Kids, Thinking

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

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• So the universe is constantly moving in the direction of higher evolutionary impulses, creativity, abstraction, and meaning.

  Deepak Chopra

  Moving, Creativity, Impulse

  9 Copy quote

• An administrator in a bureaucratic world is a man who can feel big by merging his non-entity in an abstraction. A real person in touch with real things inspires terror in him.

  Marshall McLuhan

  Real, Men, Inspire

  Marshall McLuhan, Matie Molinaro, Corinne McLuhan, William Toye (1987). “Letters of Marshall McLuhan”, Oxford University Press, USA

  11 Copy quote

  Show source

• Women's rights is not only an abstraction, a cause; it is also a personal affair. It is not only about us; it is also about me and you. Just the two of us.

  Toni Morrison

  Equality, Sisterhood, Rights

  Barnard College Commencement Address, May 1979.

  11 Copy quote

  Show source

• I believe that history has shape, order, and meaning; that exceptional men, as much as economic forces, produce change; and that passe abstractions like beauty, nobility, and greatness have a shifting but continuing validity.

  Camille Paglia

  Change, Beauty, Believe

  Camille Paglia (2011). “Sex, Art, and American Culture: Essays”, p.99, Vintage

  10 Copy quote

  Show source

• Quality is a direct experience independent of and prior to intellectual abstractions.

  Robert M. Pirsig

  Knowledge, Independent, Learning

  Robert M. Pirsig (1991). “LILA An Inquriry into Morals”

  35 Copy quote

  Show source

• Even at its most perceptive, sociology deals in abstractions.

  Richard Russo

  Sociology, Deals, Sociological

  9 Copy quote

• Abstraction brings the world into more complex, variable relations; it can extract beauty, alternative topographies, ugliness, and intense actualities from seeming nothingness.

  Jerry Saltz

  Topography, Alternatives, World

  "Ask an Art Critic: Jerry Saltz Answers Your Questions About George Condo, Online Art Fairs, and What Abstraction Really Is" by Jerry Saltz, www.huffingtonpost.com. February 24, 2011.

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• Abstraction is one of the greatest visionary tools ever invented by human beings to imagine, decipher, and depict the world.

  Jerry Saltz

  World, Tools, Visionaries

  "Ask an Art Critic: Jerry Saltz Answers Your Questions About George Condo, Online Art Fairs, and What Abstraction Really Is" by Jerry Saltz, www.huffingtonpost.com. February 24, 2011.

  9 Copy quote

  Show source

• We are so much the victims of abstraction that with the Earth in flames we can barely rouse ourselves to wander across the room and look at the thermostat.

  Terence McKenna

  Flames, Mind Blowing, Looks

  13 Copy quote

• Physics is an otherworld thing, it requires a taste for things unseen, even unheard of- a high degree of abstraction... These faculties die off somehow when you grow up... profound curiosity happens when children are young. I think physicists are the Peter Pans of the human race... Once you are sophisticated, you know too much- far too much. Pauli once said to me, "I know a great deal. I know too much. I am a quantum ancient.".

  Isidor Isaac Rabi

  Growing Up, Children, Thinking

  11 Copy quote

• Developing Christlike attributes in our lives is not an easy task, especially when we move away from generalities and abstractions and begin to deal with real life. The test comes in practicing what we proclaim. The reality check comes when Christlike attributes need to become visible in our lives—as husband or wife, as father or mother, as son or daughter, in our friendships, in our employment, in our business, and in our recreation. We can recognize our growth, as can those around us, as we gradually increase our capacity to 'act in all holiness before [Him]' (D&C 43:9).

  Dieter F. Uchtdorf

  Daughter, Mother, Husband

  4 Copy quote

• The philosopher Elaine Scarry has observed that "beauty always takes place in the particular." Cruelty, on the other hand, prefers abstraction.

  Jonathan Safran Foer

  Hands, Philosopher, Cruelty

  "Eating Animals". Book by Jonathan Safran Foer, 2010.

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• I could not bear the deep freeze settling around my bones at the thought that yet another attempt to get out of my life alive would end in disappointment. Time became palpable and viscous. Every minute, every second, every nanosecond, wrapped around my spine so that my nerves tightened and ached. I faded into abstraction. A self-generated narcosis created a painful blank where my mind used to be.

  Elizabeth Wurtzel

  Disappointment, Self, Mind

  Elizabeth Wurtzel (2014). “Prozac Nation: Young and Depressed in America”, p.111, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• Time is an absurdity. An abstraction. The only thing that matters is this moment. This moment a million times over. You have to trust me. If this moment is repeated enough, if you keep trying — and you have to keep trying — eventually you will come across the next item on your list.

  Jonathan Nolan

  Over You, Trying, Matter

  "Memento Mori". Short story by Jonathan Nolan, www.esquire.com. January 29, 2007.

  9 Copy quote

  Show source

• She really was pretty, for a grown-up person, but when you are seven, beauty is an abstraction, not an imperative. I wonder what I would have done if she had smiled at me like that now: whether I would have handed my mind or my heart or my identify to her for the asking, as my father did.

  Neil Gaiman

  Father, Heart, Mind

  4 Copy quote

• If you have had your attention directed to the novelties in thought in your own lifetime, you will have observed that almost all really new ideas have a certain aspect of foolishness when they are first produced, and almost any idea which jogs you out of your current abstractions may be better than nothing.

  Alfred North Whitehead

  Ideas, Attention, May

  4 Copy quote

• I have painted portraits that to me are almost photographic. I remember hesitating to show the paintings, they looked so real to me. But they have passed into the world as abstractions - no one seeing what they are.

  Georgia O'Keeffe

  Real, Portraits, World

  Georgia O'Keeffe, Barbara Haskell, Museum of Fine Arts (Museum of New Mexico) (1985). “Georgia O'Keeffe, Works on Paper: Museum of Fine Arts, Museum of New Mexico, Santa Fe”, Museum of New Mexico Pr

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• When a man knows that the abstraction ten exists - nothing on earth can stop him from looking for the fact of eleven.

  Lorraine Hansberry

  Men, Curiosity, Earth

  Lorraine Hansberry (2012). “Les Blancs: The Collected Last Plays: The Drinking Gourd/What Use Are Flowers?”, p.114, Vintage

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• The abstraction is often the most definite form for the intangible thing in myself that I can clarify in paint.

  Georgia O'Keeffe

  Art, Paint, Form

  Georgia O'Keeffe, Jonathan Stuhlman, Barbara Buhler Lynes (2007). “Georgia O'Keeffe: Circling Around Abstraction”, p.15, Hudson Hills

  14 Copy quote

  Show source

• I cannot worship the abstractions of virtue: she only charms me when she addresses herself to my heart, speaks through the love from which she springs.

  Reinhold Niebuhr

  Spring, Heart, Addresses

  7 Copy quote