Abstraction Quotes

• Do not copy nature too much. Art is an abstraction.

  

  Paul Gauguin
  • Abstraction

• The state, the state apparatus, is not an abstraction.

  

  Samora Machel
  • Abstraction
  • Apparatus

• Time isn't made of anything. It is an abstraction. Just a meaning that we impose upon motion.

  

  Anne Carson
  • Time
  • Motion
  • Abstraction

• Music mirrors where we should go, have gone and can go. Music is an abstraction.

  

  Max Roach
  • Should
  • Gone
  • Mirrors

• Every good composition is above all a work of abstraction. All good painters know this. But the painter cannot dispense with subjects altogether without his work suffering impoverishment.

  

  Diego Rivera
  • Suffering
  • Painter
  • Subjects

• To arrive at abstraction, it is always necessary to begin with a concrete reality.

  

  Pablo Picasso
  • Reality
  • Arrive
  • Abstraction

• Pay attention to minute particulars. Take care of the little ones. Generalization and abstraction are the plea of the hypocrite, scoundrel, and knave.

  

  William Blake
  • Attention
  • Take Care
  • Generalization

• Philosophers stretch the meaning of words until they retain scarcely anything of their original sense. They give the name of "God" to some vague abstraction which they have created for themselves; having done so they can pose before all the world as deists, as believers of God, and they can even boast that they have recognized a higher, purer concept of God, notwithstanding that their God is not nothing more than an insubstantial shadow and no longer the mighty personality of religious doctrines.

  

  Sigmund Freud
  • God
  • Philosophers
  • Believers

• If I see a human body on the stage, I don't see it as an abstraction. I see it as a body.

  

  Antony Tudor
  • Body
  • Stage
  • Abstraction

• 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
  • Famous
  • Wanted
  • Income

• The acts of the mind, wherein it exerts its power over simple ideas, are chiefly these three: 1. Combining several simple ideas into one compound one, and thus all complex ideas are made. 2. The second is bringing two ideas, whether simple or complex, together, and setting them by one another so as to take a view of them at once, without uniting them into one, by which it gets all its ideas of relations. 3. The third is separating them from all other ideas that accompany them in their real existence: this is called abstraction, and thus all its general ideas are made.

  

  John Locke Nazareth
  • Mind
  • Power
  • Ideas

• Whether a photo or music, or a drawing or anything else I might do—it’s ultimately all an abstraction of my peculiar experience.

  

  William Eggleston
  • Drawing
  • Might
  • Peculiar

• Absolute honesty is as absurd an abstraction as an absolute temperature or an absolute value.

  

  George Bernard Shaw
  • Value
  • Honestly
  • Absurd

• To us investigators, the concept 'soul' is irrelevant and a matter for laughter. But matter is an abstraction of exactly the same kind, just as good and just as bad as it is. We know as much about the soul as we do of matter.

  

  Ernst Mach
  • Soul
  • Laughter
  • Investigators

• Culture is an abstraction; it cannot actually be seen or touched.... We see people acting in agreed-upon ways in the face of similar situations...we notice people moving their bodies in certain ways – making choices in their lives about where to live, what to eat, how to learn, how to work and love – in response to similar events and experiences, and say: "oh, these people belong to the same culture".

  

  H. Ned Seelye
  • People
  • Work
  • Culture

• To be a good programmer, you need to understand the principles of generic programming. To understand the principles of generic programming, you need to understand abstraction. To understand abstraction, you need to understand the mathematics on which it’s based.

  

  Alexander Stepanov
  • Mathematics
  • Abstraction
  • Programmer

• The abstraction, ostensibly, is simply for me the penetration of something that is more profound in many ways than rigidity of a form. A form if it breathes some, if it has some enigma to it, it is also the enigma that is the abstract, I would think.

  

  Beauford Delaney
  • Profound
  • Enigma
  • Penetration

• There are ages in which the rational man and the intuitive man stand side by side, the one in fear of intuition, the other with scorn for abstraction. The latter is just as irrational as the former is inartistic.

  

  Friedrich Nietzsche
  • Fear
  • Abstraction
  • Rational Man

• ..the rejection of impressionistic copies of nature and a move towards sensing the content, abstraction, – expressing the extract..

  

  Gabriele Munter
  • Rejection
  • Towards
  • Impressionistic

• There is an amount of abstraction in my movies, and sometimes they don't really understand it until the film is finished.

  

  Michel Gondry
  • Sometimes
  • Film
  • Amount

• Psychologically, the teaching of abstractions first is wrong. Indeed, a thorough understanding of the concrete must precede the abstract.

  

  Morris Kline
  • Understanding
  • Teaching
  • Thorough

• Abstraction has always been around, since the drawings in the caves. It exists in all cultures all over the world. I thought for a while that it was going to be the major movement. But people always drift back to realism. I guess there is a certain security in that.

  

  Brice Marden
  • World
  • Cultures
  • Caves

• Age, like wealth is but a mental abstraction, my boy~ Herr Doktor Pavel

  

  K. W. Jeter
  • Age
  • Wealth
  • Mental

• As a movement Cubism had consistently stopped short of complete abstraction. Heretics such as Delaunay had painted pure abstractions but in so doing had deserted Cubism.

  

  Alfred H. Barr, Jr.
  • Abstraction
  • Cubism

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