Abstraction Quotes - Page 6

• I think it's more, at least at the time, a sense of abstraction. My mind doesn't really work in a way where there's a definitive sense of something. I go one way and then it opens up into a million different ideas, and somehow, when you look at the art, Buddhist art, or particularly Tibetan art, you know, it's a similar thing. All of a sudden there are a million lotus leaves and you're following one to the next and to another, and I related to that, and it felt simple and easy to me. And it made me feel smart.

  Jake Gyllenhaal

  Art, Buddhist, Thinking

  "10 Years After 'Brokeback,' Jake Gyllenhaal Remembers Heath Ledger: 'Way Beyond His Years as a Human'". Interview with Stephen Galloway, www.hollywoodreporter.com. November 25, 2015.

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• America is a simplified ideological abstraction, an emotive symbol represented by other abstract symbols like the flag. It is the object of a faithlike devotion, unencumbered by honest history.

  Michael Parenti

  America, Flags, Honest

  Michael Parenti (2004). “Superpatriotism”, p.9, City Lights Books

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• Remember that every science is based upon an abstraction. An abstraction is taking a point of view or looking at things under a certain aspect or from a particular angle.

  Fulton J. Sheen

  Views, Remember, Angle

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• All that is alive tends toward color, individuality, specificity, effectiveness and opacity. All that is done with life inclines toward knowledge, abstraction, generality transfiguration and transparency.

  Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

  Effectiveness, Color, Individuality

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• Life ain't a concept. Music is not a concept. My titles are poetic abstractions of something that is with me all the time, not necessarily in music, but in life. Everybody's life.

  Merzbow

  Titles, Poetic, Music Is

  Source: thequietus.com

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• Any community that remains an abstraction is an easy target for prejudice and cruelty, but any community that becomes fully humanized is much harder to treat in that way.

  Andrew Solomon

  Community, Prejudice, Target

  Source: andrewsolomon.com

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• For me with art and all that stuff - I like abstraction. I like contortion. I mean, it's still truth. But it's truth through the center of the individual. It doesn't necessarily mean that it's fallacies or falsehoods. It just happens to be one perception of what's happening.

  Q-Tip

  Art, Mean, Stuff I Like

  Interview with Paul D. Miller, www.marandapleasantmedia.com.

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• The world of physics is essentially the real world construed by mathematical abstractions, and the world of sense is the real world construed by the abstractions which the sense-organs immediately furnish. To suppose that the "material mode" is a primitive and groping attempt at physical conception is a fatal error in epistemology.

  Susanne Katherina Langer

  Real, Errors, World

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• The power of understanding symbols, i.e. of regarding everything about a sense-datum as irrelevant except a certain form that it embodies, is the most characteristic mental trait of mankind. It issues in an unconscious, spontaneous process of abstraction, which goes on all the time in the human mind: a process of recognizing the concept in any configuration given to experience, and forming a conception accordingly. That is the real sense of Aristotle's definition of Man as "the rational animal".

  Susanne Katherina Langer

  Real, Animal, Men

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• I have been interested in the dialogue of abstraction and modernist painting - and the rich history of the grid. I also think I have been influenced a bit by some of the particular qualities of the Bay Area. The weather and the atmosphere here is so exotic, like the fog rolling in and the nuanced differences in the quality of light.

  Stephen Beal

  Thinking, Light, Fog

  Interview with Jason-Louise Graham, jasonlouise-graham.squarespace.com. Novemeber 19, 2010.

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• If people would stop objectifying abstractions (which they probably never will), or if they would stop objectifying the abstractions they make consciously (which they might learn to do), at least half the pseudo-questions befuddling the world today - as they have befuddled it since time immemorial - would vanish. And that would be a very, very great gain.

  Cassius Jackson Keyser

  People, Would Be, Half

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• I do believe abstraction is and was meant to embody deep emotion. I believe that's its job, in the history of art.

  Sean Scully

  Art, Jobs, Believe

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• Life is the path. Can the path be seen? Observe the path and you are far from it. Without observation how can one know they are on the path? The path cannot be seen, nor can it not be unseen. Perception is delusion; abstraction is nonsensical. Your path is freedom. Name it and it vanishes.

  Eric S. Nylund

  Names, Perception, Unseen

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• When a mother comes home with her new baby, she will find her abstractions are all concrete now. 'Freedom' now means being able to take a shower. 'Mobility' means being able to reach the glass of water on the dresser while not breaking the baby's suction on the breast. 'Flexibility' means being able to push the Record function on the VCR without dropping the baby.

  Marni Jackson

  Mother, Baby, Mean

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• Beauty comes from the balance between two and three dimensions, between abstraction and representation - I seek the equilibrium behind changing appearances.

  Henri Matisse

  Two, Balance, Three

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• Abstraction means getting away from a visual interpretation but nearer to an emotional one.

  Henry Moore

  Mean, Emotional, Interpretation

  Henry Moore, Alan G. Wilkinson (2002). “Henry Moore-- Writings and Conversations”, p.114, Univ of California Press

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• The pendulum of mathematics swings back and forth towards abstraction and away from it with a timing that remains to be estimated.

  Gian-Carlo Rota

  Swings, Timing, Mathematics

  Gian-Carlo Rota (2009). “Indiscrete Thoughts”, p.30, Springer Science & Business Media

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• The human brain finds it extremely hard to cope with a new level of abstraction. This is why it was well into the eighteenth century before mathematicians felt comfortable dealing with zero and with negative numbers, and why even today many people cannot accept the square root of minus-one as a genuine number.

  Keith Devlin

  Zero, Roots, Numbers

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• The first thing to realize about physics ... is its extraordinary indirectness.... For physics is not about the real world, it is about "abstractions" from the real world, and this is what makes it so scientific.... Theoretical physics runs merrily along with these unreal abstractions, but its conclusions are checked, at every possible point, by experiments.

  Anthony Standen

  Running, Real, Science

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• There are absences, but there are also presences. It's about how painting can evolve its own abstractions. I didn't know the painting was going to be about that, but it has to have that journey; I have to learn something, I have to end up somewhere I didn't expect to be, otherwise, I don't think it's painting.

  Nigel Cooke

  Thinking, Journey, Painting

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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• There's nothing small or inconsequential about our stories. There is, in fact, nothing bigger. And when we tell the truth about our lives - the broken parts, the secret parts, the beautiful parts - then the gospel comes to life, an actual story about redemption, instead of abstraction and theory and things you learn in Sunday School.

  Shauna Niequist

  Beautiful, School, Sunday

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• This [terrorists attacks on 9/11] was part of nothing. It was a leap into another realm - the realm of crazy abstractions and mythological generalities, involving people who have hijacked Islam for their own purposes. It's important not to fall into that trap and to try to respond with a metaphysical retaliation of some sort.

  Edward Said

  Crazy, Fall, People

  Source: www.progressive.org

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• When we were kids, you picked up a little paper and put it on a stick; and when you waved it back and forth, you understood the power of air underneath the wings. In that way, a child begins to understand abstraction, poetry, metaphor, symbolism. You play with the materials you have and use your imagination to make them into something else. That what's so sad about having everything on a little screen - it's not physical and dimensional, and that seems backward.

  Julie Taymor

  Children, Kids, Air

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• Essentially, I look for what is interesting to me, out there in the three-dimensional world, and translate or interpret so that it becomes visually pleasing in a two-dimensional photographic print. I search for subject matter with visual patterns, interesting abstractions and graphic compositions.

  Michael Kenna

  Two, Interesting, Looks

  Source: www.smh.com.au

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• Consumers cannot think in abstractions. They cannot envision a new concept. They cannot predict their behavior. They can only compare against their current frame of reference. So you need to make the big leap for them. You need to provide them with a reason to buy, a reason to brag to their friends. Expect new-to-the-world ideas to fall on deaf ears. Consumers will, however, change their tune when they can see, touch, and explore.

  Michael J. Silverstein

  Fall, Thinking, Ideas

  Source: bobmorris.biz

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