Abstract Quotes

That’s the huge problem with an abstract painting. When are you done? You’re done when you don’t want to do it anymore.

I always say that writing non-fiction versus writing fiction is a bit like architecture versus abstract painting.

Developing characters is a strange thing. In the beginning they are abstract and I wonder how to move on from there.

In a strict sense photography can never be abstract, for the camera is incapable of synthetic integration.

My powers of empathy, my ability to reach into another's heart, cannot penetrate the blank stares of those who would murder innocents with abstract, serene satisfaction.

Abstract work, if one wishes to do it well, must be allowed to destroy one's humanity; one raises a monument which is at the same time a tomb, in which, voluntarily, one slowly inters oneself.

Abstract knowledge is not enough. At the end of the day, it's about how one reacts to circumstances in an extreme real-time situation.

Human intellect is incurably abstract.

Blaming TV as an abstract entity is nonsensical. It's our hand on the remote. There's a world out there outside the tube.

The process by which civilization, as an abstract entity distinct from the societies in which it is embodied, dies or is reborn is a very significant one.

Mathematics, even in its present and most abstract state, is not detached from life. It is just the ideal handling of the problems of life.

Honest talk about the deficit is risky. Voters are more enthusiastic about the abstract notion of deficit reduction than about the painful details of accomplishing it.

Funerals are all abstract ceremony.

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

I've always said that I expected to grow up and get married like any nice southern girl, but the fact is you don't get married in the abstract. You find someone that you'd like to be married to.

And in this passion for understanding her soul lay close to his; she had him all to herself. But he must be made abstract first.

Once you abstract from this, once you generalize and postulate Universals, you have departed from the creative reality, and entered the realm of static fixity, mechanism, materialism.

Philosophers tend to radically underestimate the distance between abstract principles (such as "reduce suffering") and what it might actually mean for people to act on them.

The common willing of a common world is an eminently practical undertaking and not in the least abstract.

Aesthetic judgments, rather than abstract reasoning, guide and shape the process by which we all come to know what we know.

Imagination, that dost so abstract us That we are not aware, not even when A thousand trumpets sound about our ears!

All painting, no matter what you are painting, is abstract in that it's got to be organized.

I was an abstract expressionist before I had seen any abstract expressionist paintings. I started when I was a kid and continued just doing abstract stuff all through high school.

I can never fathom it when people say things like "I can't understand abstract art!" Or: "Abstract art is junk!" Or: "Abstract art isn't as valid as realism!"

I am not comfortable with abstract writing, stories that look like essays: you have to see, I need to see.

My work sometimes can be abstract and appear not to have a direct relationship to Afro-American concerns, but, in fact, it is based on that.

Abstract liberty, like other mere abstractions, is not to be found.

The inner and outer, the visible and invisible, the abstract and concrete - you've got to get the balance right (not that I do, but it's something to aim for).

fashion seems to exist for an abstract person who is not you or me.

And while I was not an admirer of people in the specific, I liked them in the abstract. It is only the execution of the idea that disappoints.

Detailed descriptions, abstract ambitions, relevant observations, your's and mine.

The concrete is better than the abstract. The detail is better than the commonplace. The sensual [through the senses] is better than the intellectual. The visual is better than the mental.

Everything you do is political, even if it's abstract. You're making a political statement even if it's unwittingly.

Abstraction is itself an abstract word and has no single meaning ... Every word in our language is abstract, because it represents something else.

I did grow up in a rough neighborhood in Portland, which is an abstract concept for anybody who's rolled through Portland because now it looks like a TV set, literally.

Because there's just so much in a day now, I keep writing in much more abstract terms, like I don't try to write about what happened anymore. It would be impossible.

It is a good deal easier for most people to state an abstract idea than to describe and thus re-create some object they actually see.

Painting is a duality and abstract painting is an entirely aesthetic thing. It always remains on one level. It is only really interesting in the beauty of its patterns or its shapes.

Israel defined its God and its relation to that God in existential, relational terms. They did not, until quite late, approach the question of one God in an abstract philosophical way.

But man is so addicted to systems and to abstract conclusions that he is prepared deliberately to distort the truth, to close his eyes and ears, but justify his logic at all cost.

With God thoughts are colors, with us they are pigments-even the most abstract one may be accompanied by physical pain.

Money-crimes have an abstract quality. History is laden with the victims of gold, but their remains are odourless.

Objective painting is not good painting unless it is good in the abstract sense.

You can write very obtuse and abstract lyrics, and if they want to, people are going to find something amazing that you're saying.

I want to cover all areas that can be depicted visually. This ranges from fairytales to attempts to enter the abstract and view oneself as a social outcast or someone struggling to stay alive.

When she was fifteen if you'd told her that when she was twenty she'd be going to bed with bald-headed men and liking it, she would have thought you very abstract.

Talk with M. Hermite. He never evokes a concrete image, yet you soon perceive that the more abstract entities are to him like living creatures.

The idea of abstract power only exists for academics, not in real life.

If our minds could get hold of one abstract truth, they would be immortal so far as that truth is concerned. My trouble is to find out how we can get hold of the truth at all.

We shall some day catch an abstract truth by the tail, and then we shall have our religion and our immortality.