Abstract Quotes

• What I want to express is a feeling-various emotions that I am experiencing at the time-whether it is anger or hope or anything else, and from different angles. I construct a collection and it takes concrete form. That's probably what appears conceptual to people because it never starts out with any specific historical or geographical reference. My point of departure is always abstract and multileveled.

  

  Rei Kawakubo
  • Emotions
  • Express
  • Collection

• Music, the most abstract and uncanny art, is an eternal river of sound moving through time. We can free ourselves from whatever may be holding us back, and join that flowing river.

  

  William Westney
  • Moving
  • Sound
  • Rivers

• Art bids us touch and taste and hear and see the world, and shrinks from what Blake calls mathematic form, from every abstract form, from all that is of the brain only.

  

  William Butler Yeats
  • World
  • Art
  • Brain

• People like the idea of innovation in the abstract, but when you present them with any specific innovation, they tend to reject it because it doesn't fit with what they already know.

  

  Jessica Livingston
  • People
  • Ideas
  • Innovation

• The more chaos there is, the more science holds on to abstract systems of control, and the more chaos is engendered.

  

  William Irwin Thompson
  • Science
  • Chaos
  • Abstract

• When money gets too far away from actual, physical, real equity and property it gets too abstract and too distantly derived and then suddenly it's not worth anything anymore. And the same is true of language.

  

  Roy Blount, Jr.
  • Real
  • Language
  • Property

• To give the theory plenty of 'rope' and see if it hangs itself eventually is better tactics than to choke it off at the outset b abstract accusations of self-contradiction

  

  William James
  • Truth
  • Giving
  • Accusation

• I try to make concrete that which is abstract.

  

  Juan Gris
  • Make
  • Abstract
  • Concrete

• Everybody who reasons carefully about anything is making a contribution ... and if you abstract it away and send it to the Department of Mathematics they put it in books.

  

  Richard Feynman
  • Book
  • Reason
  • Mathematics

• Whatever is most abstract may perhaps be the summit of reality.

  

  Pablo Picasso
  • Reality
  • Abstract
  • Summit

• I’ve always assumed that the abstract qualities of [my] photographs are obvious. For instance, I can turn them upside down and they’re still interesting to me as pictures. If you turn a picture that’s not well organized upside down, it won’t work.

  

  William Eggleston
  • Interesting
  • Quality
  • Photograph

• I always just been a fan of the music... and the aesthetic only in an abstract sense.

  

  Colin Marston Behold... The Arctopus
  • Fans
  • Aesthetic
  • Abstract

• In abstract love of humanity one almost always only loves oneself.

  

  Fyodor Dostoevsky
  • Love
  • Humanity
  • Abstract

• Living in Beijing, writing about politically sensitive things now and then, you get used to the idea that somebody, somewhere, might be watching. But it is usually an abstract threat.

  

  Evan Osnos
  • Watching
  • Politically
  • Beijing

• Some physicists describe gravity in terms of ten dimensions all curled up. But those aren't real words-just placeholders, used to refer to parts of abstract equations.

  

  Scott Adams
  • Real
  • Science
  • Term

• Pacifism, the preaching of peace in the abstract, is one of the means of duping the working class.

  

  Vladimir Lenin
  • Mean
  • Preaching
  • Pacifism

• That subject has lost its one time appeal to economists as our science has become more abstract, but my interest has even grown more intense as the questions raised by the sociology of science became more prominent.

  

  George Stigler
  • Interest
  • Subject
  • Abstract

• Our ideas must agree with realities, be such realities concrete or abstract, be they facts or be they principles, under penalty of endless inconsistency and frustration.

  

  William James
  • Reality
  • Frustration
  • Concrete

• Life is one long struggle between conclusions based on abstract ways of conceiving cases, and opposite conclusions prompted by our instinctive perception of them.

  

  William James
  • Long
  • Respect
  • Struggle

• True knowledge of good and evil as we possess is merely abstract or general, and the judgment which we pass on the order of things and the connection of causes, with a view to determining what is good or bad for us in the present, is rather imaginary than real.

  

  Baruch Spinoza
  • Knowledge
  • Evil
  • General

• We humans have a wide range of abilities that help us perceive and analyze mathematical content. We perceive abstract notions not just through seeing but also by hearing, by feeling, by our sense of body motion and position. Our geometric and spatial skills are highly trainable, just as in other high-performance activities. In mathematics we can use the modules of our minds in flexible ways - even metaphorically. A whole-mind approach to mathematical thinking is vastly more effective than the common approach that manipulates only symbols.

  

  William Thurston
  • Thinking
  • Helping
  • Humans

• Where human eyes have never seen, where human beings have never been, I build a world of abstract dreams, and I wait for you.

  

  Sun Ra
  • World
  • Dream
  • Waiting

• I am convinced that abstract form, imagery, color, texture, and material convey meaning equal to or greater than words.

  

  Katherine McCoy
  • Color
  • Information
  • Meaning

• The average development time for a Hollywood movie is nine years. Nine years for a studio film. And a lot of what you do is abstract.

  

  Stephen Gaghan
  • Film
  • Development
  • Average

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