Abstraction Quotes - Page 9

• The music is the imperative. It has the upper hand. I think all music, even though it's an abstraction, does motivate a particular meaning. Then it's the job of the musician to honor that meaning and to somehow implement lyrical material that can accommodate that emotional environment.

  Sufjan Stevens

  Jobs, Emotional, Thinking

  Interview with Jason Crock, pitchfork.com. May 15, 2006.

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• I've always wondered, like, what is so masculine about abstraction? How did men get the ownership over this?

  Cecily Brown

  Men, Ownership, Masculine

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• True leaders have so much power they are willing to give it away. Power is not a fixed, quantifiable sum; instead it is an unlimited abstraction which grows as it is shared.

  Marlene Caroselli

  Leadership, Power, Giving

  Marlene Caroselli, William J. Rothwell, Dale C. Brandenburg (1990). “The Language of leadership”, Center for Professional development

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• But we must not underestimate the potency of the mathematical process of abstraction. A surprising variety of things happen to have both magnitude and direction and to combine according to the parallelogram law; and many of them are not at all reminiscent of journeys.

  Banesh Hoffmann

  Journey, Law, Statistics

  Banesh Hoffmann (2012). “About Vectors”, p.8, Courier Corporation

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• Because the results are expressed in numbers, it is easy to make the mistake of thinking that the intelligence test is a measure like a foot ruler or a pair of scales. It is, of course, a quite different sort of measure. Intelligence is not an abstraction like length and weight; it is an exceedingly complicated notion - which nobody has yet succeeded in defining.

  Walter Lippmann

  Mistake, Thinking, Feet

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• I think there's a little more attention to human needs than to property rights. But I don't think much of political activism. It's so shortsighted. Most people are interested in their own personal comfort. I've said that about environmentalists. I think they care about bike paths and places to park their Volvos, not the planet as an abstraction.

  George Carlin

  Thinking, Rights, People

  Source: www.motherjones.com

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• We can tell people abstract rules of thumb which we have derived from prior experiences, but it is very difficult for other people to learn from these. We have difficulty remembering such abstractions, but we can more easily remember a good story. Stories give life to past experience. Stories make the events in memory memorable to others and to ourselves. This is one of the reasons why people like to tell stories.

  Roger Schank

  Memories, Memorable, Writing

  Roger C. Schank (1995). “Tell Me a Story: Narrative and Intelligence”, p.10, Northwestern University Press

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• It seems to me that this whole alone is worthy of the deeper sort of love; and that there is peace, freedom, I might say a kind of salvation, in turning one's affections outward toward this one God, rather than inwards on one's self, or on humanity, or on human imaginations and abstractions - the world of the spirits.

  Robinson Jeffers

  Peace, Self, Imagination

  Robinson Jeffers, Albert Gelpi (2003). “The Wild God of the World: An Anthology of Robinson Jeffers”, p.189, Stanford University Press

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• I want my pictures to cut through political abstractions... and make a connection on a human level.

  James Nachtwey

  Photography, Cutting, Political

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• The cartooning was always just an abstraction. It was an income. It was making me famous. It was allowing me to go and do other things that I'd wanted to do.

  Berkeley Breathed

  Income, Wanted, Allowing

  Source: www.npr.org

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• To abstract is to draw out the essence of a matter. To abstract in art is to separate certain fundamentals from irrelevant material which surrounds them.

  Ben Shahn

  Art, Essence, Matter

  Ben Shahn (1957). “The Shape of Content”, p.63, Harvard University Press

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• For such will be our ruin if you, in the immensity of your public abstractions, forget the private figure, or if we in the intensity of our private emotions forget the public world. Both houses will be ruined, the public and the private, the material and the spiritual, for they are inseparably connected.

  Virginia Woolf

  Spiritual, House, World

  Virginia Woolf, Morag Shiach (1998). “A Room of One's Own: And, Three Guineas”, p.365

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• We want spiritual principles to be more than beautiful abstractions; we want them to actually transform our lives.

  Marianne Williamson

  Beautiful, Spiritual, Principles

  Marianne Williamson (2004). “Everyday Grace: Having Hope, Finding Forgiveness, and Making Miracles”, p.12, Penguin

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• Perhaps the efforts of the true poets, founders, religions, literatures, all ages, have been, and ever will be, our time and times to come, essentially the same - to bring people back from their present strayings and sickly abstractions, to the costless, average, divine, original concrete.

  Walt Whitman

  Average, People, Effort

  Walt Whitman (1963). “Prose works 1892”

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• New York... is a city of geometric heights, a petrified desert of grids and lattices, an inferno of greenish abstraction under a flat sky, a real Metropolis from which man is absent by his very accumulation.

  Roland Barthes

  New York, Real, Men

  Roland Barthes, Susan Sontag (1983). “Barthes: Selected Writings”

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• Cubism did not accept the logical consequences of its own discoveries; it was not developing abstraction towards its own goal, the expression of pure reality.

  Piet Mondrian

  Reality, Discovery, Expression

  Piet Mondrian (2008). “Plastic art and pure plastic art, 1937, and other essays, 1941-1943”, Alan Wofsy Fine Arts

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• This new plastic idea will ignore the particulars of appearance, that is to say, natural form and colour. On the contrary it should find its expression in the abstraction of form and colour, that is to say, in the straight line and the clearly defined primary colour.

  Piet Mondrian

  Ideas, Expression, Lines

  "Letters of the great artists" by Richard Friedenthal, translated by Daphne Woodward, Thames and Hudson, London, (p. 236), 1963.

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• We call those works of art concrete that came into being on the basis of their inherent resources and rules - without external borrowing from natural phenomena, without transforming those phenomena, in other words: not by abstraction.

  Max Bill

  Art, Natural, Resources

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• I cannot stand forward, and give praise or blame to any thing which relates to human actions, and human concerns, on a simple view of the subject as it stands stripped of every relation, in all the nakedness and solitude of metaphysical abstraction. Circumstances (which with some gentlemen pass for nothing) give in reality to every political principle its distinguishing colour, and discriminating effect. The circumstances are what render every civil and political scheme beneficial or noxious to mankind.

  Edmund Burke

  Simple, Reality, Views

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• Cruelty...prefers abstraction. Some have tried to resolved this gap by hunting or butchering an animal themselves, as if those experiences might somehow legitimize the endeavor of eating animals. This is very silly. Murdering someone would surely prove that you are capable of killing, but it woudln't be the most reasonable way to understand why you should or shouldn't do it.

  Jonathan Safran Foer

  Silly, Animal, Hunting

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• Hideous psychic fallout they'd all endured both in active marijuana-dependency and then in marijuana-detox: the social isolation, anxious lassitude, and the hyperself-consciousness that then reinforced the withdrawal and anxiety - the increasing emotional abstraction, poverty of affect, and then total emotional catalepsy - the obsessive analyzing, finally the paralytic stasis that results from obsessive analysis of all possible implications of both getting up from the couch and not getting up from the couch.

  David Foster Wallace

  Marijuana, Emotional, Psychics

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• Zen is a liberation from time. For if we open our eyes and see clearly, it becomes obvious that there is no other time than this instant, and that the past and the future are abstractions without any concrete reality.

  Alan Watts

  Eye, Past, Reality

  Alan Watts (1989). “The way of Zen”, Vintage

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• Self-actualized people...live more in the real world of nature than in the man-made mass of concepts, abstractions, expectations, beliefs and stereotypes that most people confuse with the world.

  Abraham Maslow

  Real, Men, Self

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• I do not write for a select minority, which means nothing to me, nor for that adulated platonic entity known as ‘The Masses’. Both abstractions, so dear to the demagogue, I disbelieve in. I write for myself and for my friends, and I write to ease the passing of time.

  Jorge Luis Borges

  Writing, Mean, Minorities

  Norman Thomas Di Giovanni, Jorge Luis Borges, Anglo-Argentine Society (1988). “In memory of Borges”, Not Avail

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• With regard to the idea of whether you have a right to health care, you have to realize what that implies. It’s not an abstraction. I’m a physician. That means you have a right to come to my house and conscript me. It means you believe in slavery. It means that you’re going to enslave not only me, but the janitor at my hospital, the person who cleans my office, the assistants who work in my office, the nurses.

  Rand Paul

  Believe, Mean, Ideas

  "Did Rand Paul equate a right to health care with slavery?" by Louis Jacobson, www.politifact.com. May 27, 2015.

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