Top 80 Abstraction Quotes

In the ‘Nude Descending a Staircase,’ I wanted to create a static image of movement: movement is an abstraction, a deduction articulated within the painting, without our knowing if a real person is or isn’t descending an equally real staircase.

I’m really interested in the nondefinitive element of abstraction.

When I started the band, the name ‘Silver Jews’ had no literal meaning – it was just an abstraction.

Abstraction is real, probably more real than nature.

Abstraction is one of the greatest visionary tools ever invented by human beings to imagine, decipher, and depict the world.

If creators of Christian culture hope to produce work that will bear good fruit, we must draw our life from the true source – our living Savior. He is real. He is present. But all too often we reduce him to an abstraction, giving him intellectual assent, but not our hearts.

At best, a 100-day measurement of a new presidency is a meaningless abstraction. At worst, it’s an invite to cheap politicking at the expense of the common good.

At that point it certainly would be called abstract. That is to say, you had a model and there’d be one or two or three people there drawing the model but otherwise you had abstractions all around the room, even though the model was in front of you.

Relationships do not happen in abstraction. They need a place; they need a centre, even a home.

I think I’m just generally more interested in figuration than abstraction. I think that painting abstraction often feels like painting colors to me, whereas portraits always feel like something connected. I like the exchange, the collaborative aspect of sitter and subject for sure.

I’m a Libra. I’m happy to be an air sign, but I do think I have a little too much air in my chart as a whole – some more water would be useful, especially in my personal life, as an emotional counterweight to all that abstraction.

At the same time, new concepts and abstractions flow into the picture, taking up the task of describing the universe without reference to such time or space – abstractions for which our language lacks adequate terms.

Willem de Kooning is generally credited for coming out of the painterly gates strong in the forties, revolutionizing art and abstraction and reaching incredible heights by the early fifties, and then tailing off.

I’m not an Abstraction Expressionist, but I think dedication to paintings comes from an early interest in that work.

It is terrible to destroy a person’s picture of himself in the interests of truth or some other abstraction.

We call those works of art concrete that came into being on the basis of their inherent resources and rules – without external borrowing from natural phenomena, without transforming those phenomena, in other words: not by abstraction.

Abstraction is a mental process we use when trying to discern what is essential or relevant to a problem; it does not require a belief in abstract entities.

When novels deal in abstractions, they generally go off the rails.

Abstraction is everybody’s zero but nobody’s nought.

Contrary to current cynicism about past golden ages, the abstraction known as ‘the intelligent layperson’ does exist – in the form of millions of folks with a passionate commitment to continuous learning.

Women exist in my imagination. So they are necessarily a type of abstraction. Many women criticise me for this vision, but I explain to them it’s to be expected, because I am a man.

What I hope is I’ll eventually be seen as an actual individual, not as some abstraction – an art dealer running a museum.

The dynamic element in my philosophy, taken as a whole, can be seen as an obstinate and untiring battle against the spirit of abstraction.

Things like anatomy and drawing and design and color had pretty much been drop-kicked out of the curriculum in the ’70s, when I was studying art, in favor of abstraction and minimalism.

Plane geometry is sort of the key course where you learn about proving things and abstraction.

Early-twentieth-century abstraction is art’s version of Einstein’s Theory of Relativity. It’s the idea that changed everything everywhere: quickly, decisively, for good.

There’s nothing like necessity of needing to do something to cause you to come up with abstractions that help you break through the forms.

Women’s rights is not only an abstraction, a cause; it is also a personal affair. It is not only about us; it is also about me and you. Just the two of us.

For some members of the radical Left, particularly in the West, people in developing countries are an ideological abstraction, on whom fantasies of liberation are projected from a comfortable distance.

The economy is not an abstraction. The economy consists of people, and it will only grow if people feel secure and are reasonably free.

Abstraction brings the world into more complex, variable relations; it can extract beauty, alternative topographies, ugliness, and intense actualities from seeming nothingness.

The only real life is the collective life of the race; individual life has no existence except as an abstraction.

Red Carpet has a nice package abstraction layer that allows us to support RPMs and DEBs transparently.

I began as a naturalistic painter. Very quickly I felt the urgent need for a more concise form of expression and an economy of means. I never stopped progressing toward abstraction.

I don’t like the word ‘abstractions’ very much because most people don’t think in abstractions. That is too difficult for them. They think in stories. And the best stories are not abstract; they are concrete.

Developing Christlike attributes in our lives is not an easy task, especially when we move away from generalities and abstractions and begin to deal with real life. The test comes in practicing what we proclaim.

That’s what it is that you rehearse – the making of music, not the playing of notes as abstractions.

When people hear the term ‘political prisoner,’ especially on the Left, it becomes a kind of abstraction. Folks are aware of injustice, and they’re aware that there are folks in prison who are in prison, you know, largely because of their activism.

An administrator in a bureaucratic world is a man who can feel big by merging his non-entity in an abstraction. A real person in touch with real things inspires terror in him.

Dirty Projectors has always been a band that’s been card-carrying modernists in terms of pushing different kinds of abstraction to the fore and trying to take them to the center of the culture or something like that.

The word war itself has a kind of glazing abstraction to it that conjures up bombs and bullets and so on, whereas my goal is to try to, so much as I can, capture the heart and the stomach and the back of the throat of readers who can lie in bed at night and participate in a story.

For me, music is pure abstraction.

I paint – I tend more to abstraction – but not as much as I would like to because of time. I would love to do sculpture – I’ve toyed with the idea of fitting in a sculpture course.

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

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.

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.

The job of the color photographer is to provide some level of abstraction that can take the image out of the daily.

Too often in Washington we tend to see foreign policy as an abstraction, with little understanding of what we are committing our country to: the complications and consequences of endeavors.

Men do not fight for flag or country, for the Marine Corps or glory or any other abstraction. They fight for one another. And if you came through this ordeal, you would age with dignity.

My struggle has been to return painting to the tangible object, which is like returning the personality to touching and feeling the world around it, to offset the tendency to vagueness and abstraction. To remind people of practical activity, to suggest the sense and not to escape from the senses.

A study, by its very nature, is an abstraction.

I’m endlessly intrigued by stories, and I love helping someone to formulate his or her story. I can drift off when I’m reading pure abstraction, but the narratives of human lives hold my attention every time.

Popular music was this abstraction – an abstraction that I was relating to immensely but was ultimately far away.

By object is meant some element in the complex whole that is defined in abstraction from the whole of which it is a distinction.

I have this certain vision of the way I want my comics to look; this sort of photographic realism, but with a certain abstraction that comics can give. It’s kind of a fine line.

Science is a little bit more than a wonderful way of modelling and predicting; it’s a wonderful technical abstraction. I think science is a really wonderful technical abstraction.