Top 220 Abstract Quotes

The longer you look at an object, the more abstract it becomes, and, ironically, the more real.

I paint; I draw and paint – I’ve been doing that since I was in third grade, drawing realistically and then changing to abstract art. That was my first creative thing before guitar or comedy.

The atmosphere is different in Congress after September 11. Terrorism is no longer an abstract issue, but a real, tangible threat.

I’m so fond of abstract design in the style of Vanderbilt and David Hicks and that whole 1970s era. They took the 1930s and gave it a bit of technicolour.

It’s not that prison makes you shed your abstract notions. On the contrary, it pares them down to their most succinct articulations. Prison is, indeed, a translation of your metaphysics, ethics, sense of history and whatnot into the compact terms of your daily deportment.

It’s difficult in the abstract to appreciate that those with morally objectionable viewpoints can still be good people.

The most important lesson to take away from allowing the minimum wage and unemployment benefit data to talk is that abstract notions of what is right, good and just should be examined from a concrete, operational point of view. A dose of reality is most edifying.

My aim is for every song to have a purpose – for you to be able to say, ‘This song is about this.’ But love and heartbreak are some of the most abstract subjects.

It’s so hard to do the right thing with a pen and a piece of paper and a set of abstract thoughts.

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

Height, width, and depth are the three phenomena which I must transfer into one plane to form the abstract surface of the picture, and thus to protect myself from the infinity of space.

I think you have to let go of this idea that you can be precious about everything, and let it be the abstract mess that it is.

Animals represent the abstract notion of acceptance. Living with these funny creatures – you kind of have to accept them. It’s like a test in a way.

People start to yawn when you warn them about a move toward socialism. It seems abstract. But if you discuss the issues that arise from high taxes, oppressive regulation, seizure of private property, and dictating of individual behavior, people understand them, and they reject them.

I feel like there’s a lot of albums that are like ‘woo! we’re young, let’s have fun’ and there’s a lot of albums that are abstract, with mature lyrics.

I like the fact that music is more abstract.

It’s great being an actor and being part of a play or a film where there’s usually quite a big group of people who are collaborating, and your job is really to fit in and share that energy. With music, because I write the songs, it’s a broader, more abstract process.

Being design-led means designers take ideas from the abstract to the concrete, from potential to real value.

I did take some value out of looking at the extreme simplicity of implementation that the tight resource limits required. I do feel that modern games are often abstracted a lot more than is really necessary, and it leads to robustness issues.

With the Larry Bertlemann portrait, I started with a photograph that I could use for it. I built the drawing’s identity to serve as a graphic identity. After a number of sketches, I went into my own abstract vernacular of drawn lines and shapes to create the composition for the poster design.

I’m fascinated by how much has changed from one generation to another. There are young people growing up now for whom apartheid is just a distant memory and the idea of military service is an abstract notion.

I’m a fan of genre in the abstract, but at best, perhaps all we can really say when we talk about genre is that we’re talking about an umbrella that covers a kind of story with certain elements.

I don’t think that my art isn’t serious. I think the subjects are not serious, or my treatments of the subjects are not serious. But then, I’m also putting down subject, because like the abstract expressionists, I don’t think the subject is important.

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.

My connection with Brazil is so abstract. My blood and my way of thinking is Brazilian, but that’s it. I don’t tend to go back to the past, and although I have an apartment there, I rarely visit. When I move, I really move.

I think my comedy’s probably the same as my art, which is kind of abstract, impressionist, emotional. You create an emotion and then you knock it down. You take something the way people are expecting it to go, and then give it a different conclusion.

My response, a dubious and hesitant one, is that it has been and may continue to be, in the time that is left to me, more productive to live out the question than to try to answer it in abstract terms.

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.

Music, first of all, is completely about abstraction, which is exactly what architecture is not. In a way, it has been incredibly constructive to know what true abstraction is. So you don’t fall into the trap of thinking that what you do is abstract.

Abstract sympathy with the working class as an economic entity is easy, but the feeling can vanish on contact with actual members of the group, who often arrive with disturbing beliefs and powerful resentments – who might not sound or look like people urban progressives want to know.

The most significant moment in the course of intellectual development, which gives birth to the purely human forms of practical and abstract intelligence, occurs when speech and practical activity, two previously completely independent lines of development, converge.

Abstract ideas like equality and liberty have a spurious transparency, and can be used to derive pleasing theorems in the manner of Jean-Jacques Rousseau or John Rawls.

I’ve always felt that sort of in the abstract, open-source is the right thing to do for a lot of the kinds of things that we do. There are a variety of issues that make it a very complex discussion as to whether it actually works as a business.

One thus sees that a new kind of theory is needed which drops these basic commitments and at most recovers some essential features of the older theories as abstract forms derived from a deeper reality in which what prevails in unbroken wholeness.

Abstract anger is great for rhetorical carrying on. You can go on endlessly about the post office, but it doesn’t mean you’re mad at your mailman.

I guess my experience with some stuff is kind of abstract.

All abstract sciences are nothing but the study of relations between signs.

I don’t have a huge amount of gear, but on the software side, I have a number of plug-in chains that act as abstracted versions of real instruments.

NASA is my favorite website. The universe with its abstract nature attracts me. The abstract element in my poetry comes from there.

As you see, I do not treat the creation of fiction, that to say the invention and development of fantasies, as a form of abstract thought. I don’t wish to deny the uses of the intellect, but sometimes one has the intuition that the intellect by itself will lead one nowhere.

To realize life in the abstract as noble or beautiful or humane, to set it forth so with radiance upon it, that is civilization in the arts. Shakespeare is the chief modern example of this supreme faculty of mankind.

People like abstract art because it makes them feel clever.

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

I grew up in the ’90s and remember the lyrics back then were so abstract and open to interpretation. That always drove me crazy.

I’m not into politics but I am committed to a cause: ensuring design technology and engineering stays on the U.K. curriculum, alongside science and maths – grounding abstract theory, merging the practical with the academic.

The good thing I will say about the Chicago School is that it was always about the world, not about the abstract.

Many billboards and magazine ads have resorted to showing isolated body parts rather than full-body portraits of models using or wearing products. This style of photography, known in the industry as abstract representation, allows the viewer to see himself in the advertisement, rather than the model.

Most professional women I know – myself included – long since gave up looking for a rulebook or a roadmap; we make it up as we go along. Every day presents a new choice, a new challenge, which makes long-term career planning seem like an especially abstract exercise.

I believe it is my job to do everything I can so that everyone in our society feels safe, feels that justice is not an abstract concept but a fact of life for all Americans.