Best 239 quotes in «abstract quotes» category

Sometimes, some of times in life are Lifetime!

The certainty of mathematics depends on its complete abstract generality.

Spring days, and summer days, and all sorts of days that would be her own. She breathed a quick prayer that life might be long. It was only yesterday she had thought with a shudder that life might be long.

Teaching is a dialogue, and it is through the process of engaging students that we see ideas taken from the abstract and played out in concrete visual form. Students teach us about creativity through their personal responses to the limits we set, thus proving that reason and intuition are not antithetical. Their works give aesthetic visibility to mathematical ideas.

The causal, abstract, binary, holistic, and reductionist functions of the human brain all help you to process the enormous amount of information coming into our brain from the external world every day.

Strange in a familiar way, familiar in a strange way.

These days, I'm finding it harder and harder to breathe. My chest pounds with every heart beat like you're here, again, standing in front of me, your two hands around my neck.

These estimates may well be enhanced by one from F. Klein (1849-1925), the leading German mathematician of the last quarter of the nineteenth century. 'Mathematics in general is fundamentally the science of self-evident things.' ... If mathematics is indeed the science of self-evident things, mathematicians are a phenomenally stupid lot to waste the tons of good paper they do in proving the fact. Mathematics is abstract and it is hard, and any assertion that it is simple is true only in a severely technical sense—that of the modern postulational method which, as a matter of fact, was exploited by Euclid. The assumptions from which mathematics starts are simple; the rest is not.

The truth is, almost every solid idea that comes from science is in some sense an abstraction rather than a 'real' thing.

This life we all receive is full of invisible boundaries and abstract values.

When you see a fish you don't think of its scales, do you? You think of its speed, its floating, flashing body seen through the water. Well, I've tried to express just that. If I made fins and eyes and scales, I would arrest its movement, give a pattern or shape of reality. I want just the flash of its spirits.

We have come to understand the phenomena of life only as an assemblage of the lifeless. We take the mechanistic abstractions of our technical calculation to be ultimately concrete and "fundamentally real," while our most intimate experiences are labelled "mere appearance" and something having reality only within the closet of the isolated mind. Suppose however we were to invert this whole scheme, reverse the order in which it assigns abstract and concrete. What is central to our experience, then, need not be peripheral to nature. This sunset now, for example, caught within the network of bare winter branches, seems like a moment of benediction in which the whole of nature collaborates. Why should not these colours and these charging banners of light be as much a part of the universe as the atoms and molecules that make them up? If they were only "in my mind," then I and my mind would no longer be a part of nature. Why should the pulse of life toward beauty and value not be a part of things? Following this path, we do not vainly seek to assemble the living out of configurations of dead stuff, but we descend downwards from more complex to simpler grades of the organic. From humans to trees to rocks; from "higher grade" to "lower grade" organisms. In the universe of energy, any individual thing is a pattern of activity within the flux, and thereby an organism at some level.

When you’ve been given a curse of perspective you don’t stop to consider the gift of oversight that most humans have been bestowed with.

When you live without someone for as long as I have, love becomes this abstract concept, something you attach to a memory. And when memories are that old, they feel like dreams, and you wonder if any of it was real, or if your mind created it all.

Which do you think is more patient, an idea or a hope?

You have to have time to be sorry for yourself to be a good Abstract Expressionist.

Writing is an abstract art of drawing pictures of the conscious and subconscious mind with words.

Abstract Expressionism was invented by New York drunks.

You need a body to preserve your soul, not a set of abstract principles.

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

Abstract pictures are fictive models, because they make visible a reality that we can neither see nor describe, but whose existence we can postulate.

Abstract expressionism was the first American art that was filled with anger as well as beauty.

Abstract art: a product of the untalented sold by the unprincipled to the utterly bewildered.

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.

Abstract painters: redefine your perspectives. Think in terms of the whole, not simply its parts.

Abstract painting is dead. That's why it has become so interesting again.

Abstract truth has no value unless it incarnates in human beings who represent it, by proving their readiness to die for it.

After being an Impressionist, Cubist, and an Abstract Expressionist, I was influenced by realistic artists, including Andrew Wyeth in the late '50s, and I haven't changed my style since.

All art is abstract, because art is an abstraction of the truth.

All good art is abstract.

All good art is abstract in its structure.

-- and it occurred to me that people who don't talk about themselves are limiting their own potential. They think they're guarding themselves for some sort of abstract dange, but they're actually allowing other people to decide who they are and what they're like.

All investigations of Time, however sophisticated or abstract, have at their true base the human fear of mortality.

All religions are good 'in principle' - but unfortunately this abstract Good has only rarely prevented their practitioners from behaving like bastards.

A mathematician is an individual who calls himself a 'physicist' and does 'physics' and physical experiments with abstract concepts.

Art has to be incredibly layered. Symbols, signifiers... layers that relate. Combine signifiers with more abstract notions. Push! Vary lines.

Art comes into being in that abstract interval between a thought and reality, and no one - not even the artist who created it - can remeasure the influences that caused it.

As Buddhist teachers often point out, knowledge, in the sense of prajña, is not knowledge about anything. There is no abstract knower of an experience that is separate from the experience itself.

As far as Marx's analysis of capitalism, there's a lot of very useful ideas in it, but he's developing an abstract model of 19th century capitalism. It's abstract and it's changed.

As I say, I as an abstract artist was active politically.

As a general habit and general tendency, I prefer not to bog a piece down with a great number of transitory, contemporary references, because in the end, I'm concerned, not in an abstract way, but an actual way, with creating a world which has a universality to it - even though what goes on is made up of texture and detail, contemporary detail.

Condemnation by category is the lowest form of hatred, for it is cold-hearted and abstract, lacking even the courage of a personal hatred.

Abstract art has helped us to experience the emotional power inherent in pure form.

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

Abstract propositions should never be discussed by a legislative body.

A trilogy is a pretty abstract notion. You can apply it to almost any three things.

Blue suggests the sea and sky, and they, after all, are in actual, visible nature what is most abstract.

But nobody is visually naive any longer. We are cluttered with images, and only abstract art can bring us to the threshold of the divine.

Children in the abstract, had never appealed to me. They seemed to be loud creatures, often dripping some form of goo.

Corruption is a fact of life in America as in Afganistan, but as American citizens, if we are white, we tend to experience it as an opportunity cost. I live in Washington, DC, where the city council is notoriously corrupt. But how do I experience that? Maybe in streets that are not as well paved as they could be, maybe in a bridge that costs a lot more money than it should have. That's a little bit abstract - shocking, of course - but still abstract.