Top 60 Conceptual Quotes

We often represent God to ourselves as being able to draw from non-being a world without sorrows, faults, dangers – a world in which there is no damage, no breakage. This is a conceptual fantasy and makes it impossible to solve the problem of evil.

I think that I came of age in the 1970s with my own work, and it was a time of conceptual and process art, and it was very important not to tell a story. If you told a story, when I was a young artist and first came to N.Y., it was, like, an embarrassing way to make art.

I had never thought that I would be involved in narrative structures. As a young guy, I was more interested in abstract modeling. But as I got older, I began to see that there was no reason to limit myself to any intellectual or conceptual postulate, when in fact I’m a professional student of music.

I’m not trying to do conceptual art.

I’ve come up through art school, through painting, through graphic design, through advertising, through TV commercials and music video. I’ve designed books, built billboards, matchbooks, corporate identities. I continuously paint, I’ve done conceptual art pictures.

I am particularly interested in creating a relationship between ideas of reception in conceptual art and theater.

Doctrines don’t govern policy. They provide a conceptual framework by which policymakers approach their decisions. But there is no such thing as a doctrine that controls policy in every way.

My novels aren’t really generated by a single conceptual spark; it’s more a process of many different elements that come together unexpectedly over a long period of time.

I doubt there’s any government in the world that guides itself primarily by strategy or conceptual documents or worldview. Anybody who has the reins of power has to look at practical limitations and tradeoffs – the fact that you can focus at most on one or two things at a time, that resources are limited.

I have an unusual type of thinking. I have no visual memory whatsoever. Everything is conceptual to me.

Thinking fragments reality – it cuts it up into conceptual bits and pieces.

If I had gone to art college and everybody was being a conceptual artist, I probably would have wanted to be a portrait or landscape painter.

Maths should be more practical and more conceptual, but less mechanical.

The biggest conceptual change over the last 100 years in the way physicists think about the world is symmetry.

The whole idea of a trade deal is to build a fence around participants inside and give them an advantage over the outside. So there’s a conceptual flaw in that, one of many conceptual flaws in NAFTA.

I spent a lot of time on my own working out the physical vocabulary for how Gollum moved. As I say, I drew on a lot of Tolkein’s descriptions of how he moves, but also the conceptual artist sketches.

I’ve always been very thematic with my work, very conceptual.

I much prefer a plotted novel to a novel that is really conceptual.

For a period of time, I carried cameras with me wherever I went, and then I realized that my interest in photography was turning toward the conceptual. So I wasn’t carrying around cameras shooting stuff, I was developing concepts about what I wanted to shoot. And then I’d get the camera angle and do the job.

Sometimes I think people confuse rote learning with traditional conceptual instruction.

There are very few things that are purely conceptual without any hard content.

Being in a rock n’ roll group, or being a musician, it is in conflict in some serious cultural ways with being an observant Jew, but in a conceptual way, for me, they go together real well.

I really enjoyed doing stand-up. Andy Kaufman was a big hero of mine. I tried to do conceptual stuff like he tried to do.

Murakami’s ability to deconstruct and his aesthetic and conceptual freedom have been totally inspiring for me.

I try to look at design from a more conceptual standpoint.

Conceptual art, I don’t even know what that is.

When I go to galleries in New York, I feel like I’m in school. I know that there’s good contemporary conceptual art, but I have a really hard time caring about it. I’d rather look at images of people and things I can relate to. Then again, I didn’t go to art school.

I thought conceptual art was a joke.

There is a slight problem with being a conceptual artist these days: You won’t get paid. But this levels the field and takes the art of money out of the field of serious art. The only conceptual artists who would conceive of making money on the Internet are a lowbrow species known as hustlers.

I have a master’s degree in photography as a fine art, and I would call my work primarily conceptual. I don’t carry cameras with me wherever I go. I get an idea of a subject matter I want to deal with and I pull out my cameras.

Men and women shop very differently, and where women are open to edgy, conceptual looks, very, very few men are.

We had to do the same thing here. To top that sequel was quite a task. Mike had a couple of good conceptual humour and character ideas, which got me back into it.

The conceptual artist Ai WeiWei illustrates the schizoid society that rapid change has produced – sometimes by reassembling Ming-style furniture into absurd and useless arrangements, or by carefully painting and antiquing a Coca-Cola logo on an ancient Chinese pot.

All of my favourite albums have this incredible amount of conceptual glue to them, even if they are not telling a story.

There has been much talk referencing what I consider conceptual reports like the Landscape of Choice and documents created as a result of the Great Valley Center.

‘Thursday’ is a conceptual album. Whatever that situation was, I spent the whole album focusing on that situation.

David is purely a conceptual artist. He didn’t play any instruments or paint or anything. We were painters.

If you’re going to use standards as criteria for signing musicians, you can sign thousands. If you’re going to use some sort of conceptual interpretation that’s based on the tradition of those standards, but is trying to move away from it, you’re down to about 10 people or so.

‘Pure experience’ is the name I gave to the immediate flux of life which furnishes the material to our later reflection with its conceptual categories.

I’m not the same guy that you may have seen from the ‘I Get Wet’ album. I’m not that same person, and I don’t just mean that in a philosophical or conceptual way. It’s not the same person at all.

However, in modern conceptual frameworks there is a more sophisticated view. I would say that the act of music exists in several worlds simultaneously.

A healthy economics has got to have both conceptual, theoretical research and applied, empirical research.

I would never, ever change the formula of what we would do, but what I want to do is go down somewhere really conceptual. Really artistic. Really theme-oriented. But I don’t want to push anything.

Conceptual art became the liberating idea that gave the art of the next 40 years its real impetus.

Within TG, we liberated the use of the lyric forever. There was no longer a taboo on what could be discussed in the conceptual format of a song.

I am not comparing myself to great artists, but when you see conceptual artists at work, on some level it’s reassuring to know they can paint figuratively. Likewise, when you listen to the ’50s jazz people who do these vast solos, you buy into it more if they open by playing a tune.

All of the significant art of today stems from Conceptual art. This includes the art of installation, political, feminist and socially directed art.

I don’t see any of my records as any more or less conceptual than the others, and I don’t really plan some overall idea in advance. The songs all get written under the umbrella of a certain time in your life, and it’s natural to find themes that repeat within these periods.

John Baldessari, the 79-year-old conceptualist, has spent more than four decades making laconic, ironic conceptual art-about-art, both good and bad.

I’m not knocking conceptual art; it’s another department, but it doesn’t move me like painting.

A good traditional conceptual instruction is what I got from my better professors at MIT. They would be at a chalkboard, and they would literally be explaining something and working through a problem, but it wasn’t rote. They were explaining the underlying theory and processes and intuition behind it.

People, and especially theologians, should try to familiarize themselves with scientific ideas. Of course, science is technical in many respects, but there are some very good books that try to set out some of the conceptual structure of science.

Israel produces more conceptual products than any other country.

Ai Weiwei, who is both a widely admired conceptual artist and a fearless human-rights activist, has been on the bad side of the Chinese government for years.

I’m a very conceptual writer.

I think it’s important to have diversity in comics for a thousand reasons. It’s not just some airy conceptual thing: it’s important to reflect the humanity of the readership.