Abstract Quotes

From the point of view of art, there are no concrete or abstract forms, but only forms which are more or less convincing lies.

Abstract pictures are fictive models, because they make visible a reality that we can neither see nor describe, but whose existence we can postulate.

I felt the most intense pleasure in piercing the stone in order to make an abstract form and space; quite a different sensation from that of doing it for the purpose of realism.

By phonemic trans-formation into visual terms, the alphabet became a universal, abstract, static container of meaningless sounds.

Abstract art is uniquely modern. It is a fundamentally romantic response to modern life - rebellious, individualistic, unconventional, sensitive, irritable.

Sophie Germain proved to the world that even a woman can accomplish something in the most rigorous and abstract of sciences and for that reason would well have deserved an honorary degree.

The freer the soul, the more abstract painting becomes.

The man of science, like the man of letters, is too apt to view mankind only in the abstract, selecting in his consideration only a single side of our complex and many-sided being.

This attitude [the abstract method in mathematics] can be encapsulated in the following slogan: a mathematical object is what it does.

I understand abstract art as an attempt to feed imagination with a world built through the basic sensations of the eyes.

I never learned to verbalize an abstract musical concept. No thank you. The whole point of being a serious musician is to avoid verbalization whenever you can.

The more horrifying this world becomes, the more art becomes abstract.

What goes on in abstract art is the proclaiming of aesthetic principles... It is in our own time that we have become aware of pure aesthetic considerations. Art never can be imitation.

I get satisfaction out of seeing stuff that makes real change in the real world. We need a lot more of that and a lot less abstract stuff.

Liberty is not just an idea, an abstract principle. It is power, effective power to do specific things. There is no such thing as liberty in general; liberty, so to speak, at large.

It would not be easy even for an unbeliever, to find a better translation of the rule of virtue from the abstract into the concrete, than to endeavor so to live that Christ would approve our life.

I never use nature as a starting point. I never abstract from nature; I never consciously think of nature when I paint.

It makes no difference whether a work is naturalistic or abstract; every visual expression follows the same fundamental laws

Music is the most abstract of the arts and also the most physical....music is under two signs, the stars and the wine

I always say that modernization is not an abstract thing; its a very specific task.

I don't want my generals or my defense secretary or my national-security team to ever feel deploying weapons to kill people as routine or abstract, even if the targets are bad people.

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.

I hardly need to abstract things, for each object is unreal enough already, so unreal that I can only make it real by means of painting.

My bitterness is not an abstract substance, it is as solid as a Christmas cake; I can cut it in slices and hand it round and there is still plenty left, for tomorrow.

Arithmetic has a very great and elevating effect, compelling the soul to reason about abstract number, and rebelling against the introduction of visible or tngible objects into the argument.

Do not talk to me of goodness, of abstract justice, of nature law. Necessity is the highest law, public welfare is the highest justice.

I love the abstract, delicate, profound, vague, voluptuously wordless sensation of living ecstatically.

Of all the arts, music is really the most abstract.

To those who have exhausted politics, nothing remains but abstract thought.

My guard stood hard when abstract threats, too noble to neglect, deceived me into thinking, I had something to protect.

In the abstract conception of universal wrong, all concrete responsibility vanishes.

In every landscape should reside jewels of abstract art waiting to be discovered.

When individuals and nations have once got in their heads the abstract concept of full-blown liberty, there is nothing like it in its uncontrollable strength.

I say a murder is abstract. You pull the trigger and after that you do not understand anything that happens.

Delight at having understood a very abstract and obscure system leads most people to believe in the truth of what it demonstrates.

I feel it's just some sort of game if it's just abstract.

I see philosophy as a fairly abstract activity, as concerned mainly with the analysis of criticism and concepts, and of course most usefully of scientific concepts.

Screenwriting is always about what people say or do, whereas good writing is about a thought process or an abstract image or an internal monologue, none of which works on screen.

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.

And also the new excitement and variety of ways that the abstract expressionists were applying paint. You could put it on as though it were colored air and it would be painting.

We have wasted our spirit in the regions of the abstract and general just as the monks let it wither in the world of prayer and contemplation.

I paint abstract expressions.

If the abstract paintings show my reality, then the landscapes and still-lifes show my yearning.

Let me first say that I don't think the millennium target of cutting global poverty in half is an impossible or abstract target. I think it is a real and achievable goal.

Everyone who makes films has to be an athlete to a certain degree because cinema does not come from abstract academic thinking; it comes from your knees and thighs.

To say it another way, thinking, however abstract, originates in an embodied subjectivity, at once overdetermined and permeable to contingent events.

Abstract art is a fundamental distrust of the theory of reality concocted by the eyes.

When I conform to truth, I do not conform to an abstract principle; I conform to the nature of God.

Describing comic sensibility is near impossible. It's sort of an abstract silliness, that sometimes the joke isn't the star.

Abstract Expressionism was invented by New York drunks.