Best 239 quotes in «abstract quotes» category

Our impartiality is kept for abstract merit and demerit, which none of us ever saw.

Our relationship with places is a close bond, intricate in nature, and not abstract, not remote at all: It's enveloping, almost a continuum with all we are and think.

Pacifism, the preaching of peace in the abstract, is one of the means of duping the working class.

Painting is... a richer language than words... Painting operates through signs which are not abstract and incorporeal like words. The signs of painting are much closer to the objects themselves.

Pictures, abstract symbols, materials, and colors are among the ingredients with which a designer or engineer works. To design is to discover relationships and to make arrangements and rearrangements among these ingredients.

Philosophy is not in a state of external reflection on other domains, but in a state of active and internal alliance with them, and it is neither more abstract nor more difficult.

Psychologically, the teaching of abstractions first is wrong. Indeed, a thorough understanding of the concrete must precede the abstract.

Prefer the familiar word to the far-fetched. Prefer the concrete word to the abstract. Prefer the single word to the circumlocution. Prefer the short word to the long. Prefer the Saxon word to the Romance.

Sanctuary cities are a lot like hitchhiking. And the abstract, it feels really good until you feel dead.

Quantum physics is no longer an abstract theory for specialists. We must now absolutely include it in our education and also in our culture.

Realism' has been abandoned in the search for reality: the 'principal objective' of abstract art is precisely this reality.

Relativity is inherently convergent, though convergent toward a plurality of centers of abstract truths.

She was good at playing abstract confusion in the same way that a midget is good at being short.

... scientific research is compounded of ... empirical procedures, general speculative ideas, and mathematical or abstract reasoning.

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.

Some people in China don't look at freedom of speech as an abstract ideal, but more as a means to an end.

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.

Some physicists describe gravity in terms of ten dimensions all curled up. But those aren't real words-just placeholders, used to refer to parts of abstract equations.

Theater is far superior to film in poetry, in abstract poetry.

That subject has lost its one time appeal to economists as our science has become more abstract, but my interest has even grown more intense as the questions raised by the sociology of science became more prominent.

The abstract, unreal freedom of the liberal intellect was really nothing more than childish disobedience, amplified into anarchy.

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.

The abstract has no emotional content... the abstract is more powerful the more abstract it is.

The buttocks are the most aesthetically pleasing part of the body because they are non-functional. Although they conceal an essential orifice, these pointless globes are as near as the human form can ever come to abstract art.

The language of film is further and further away from the language of theater, and is closer to music. It’s abstract but still narrative. Everything feels less rehearsed. It’s more experimental than classical.

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

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.

The force that propels the human spirit on the clear way forward and upward is the abstract spirit.

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).

The complexity of software is an essential property, not an accidental one. Hence, descriptions of a software entity that abstract away its complexity often abstracts away its essence.

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

The longer mathematics lives the more abstract - and therefore, possibly also the more practical - it becomes.

The more chaos there is, the more science holds on to abstract systems of control, and the more chaos is engendered.

The more abstract is form, the more clear and direct its appeal.

The physical world is entirely abstract and without actuality apart from its linkage to consciousness.

The piece of music is nothing without the act of interpretation. That is the only way it can live, and it's a totally abstract thing.

The only and one way to say what abstract art or art-as-art is, is to say what it is not.

there are virtues which are very well in the abstract, but which, encountered in the flesh, can be a source of extreme irritation.

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.

There is plenty of courage among us for the abstract, but not for the concrete.

There is no such thing as educational value in the abstract. The notion that some subjects and methods and that acquaintance with certain facts and truths possess educational value in and of themselves is the reason why traditional education reduced the material of education so largely to a diet of predigested materials.

There is more fine abstract design in Navajo rugs than in all these modern paintings.

There is no such thing as justice in the abstract; it is merely a compact between men.

There is something very pleasing about the principles of science and the rules of math, because they are so inevitable and so harmonious - in the abstract, anyway.

They lyrical content has grown more introspective and less abstract. I don't know if that's good or bad... Sometimes it feels a little raw to be putting so much of myself out there.

The smaller the instrument or more hidden it is such as electronics, the more esoteric it becomes and in my mind becomes boring watching someone go like this and that has no direct... It's just a complete abstract motion, not attach to any sound.

There's that great Irish joke: a man is lost in the countryside, stops a passer-by: 'how do I get to Dublin?'. The passer-by says 'well, I wouldn't start from here'. Rather than starting by talking in the abstract about materialism, dualism, 'material stuff' and things like that in regard to the mind, I would rather start from somewhere else.

The role of the pastor is to embody the gospel. And of course to get it embodied, which you can only do with individuals, not in the abstract.

The universe is governed by science. But science tells us that we can't solve the equations, directly in the abstract.

We are all hungry and thirsty for concrete images. Abstract art will have been good for one thing: to restore its exact virginity to figurative art.