Best 239 quotes in «abstract quotes» category

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

To abstract is to draw out the essence of a matter.

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.

Voting is like alchemy - taking an abstract value and breathing life into it.

Whoever thought the immediate alternates with the immediate action is not an abstract painter.

We are not talking about a new cognition in relation to abstract art, rather a new area of cognition.

We favor the visible, the embedded, the personal, the narrated, and the tangible; we scorn the abstract.

We invoke the sacrifices of our fallen heroes in the abstract, but we seldom take time to thank them individually.

We know how to work certain toys, and if you've got something in your head you know how to get in on tape, even if it's got an abstract sound to it. We are kind of producers as well as a band, so we're a self-contained unit. We can produce our own record as well as write it.

We shall some day catch an abstract truth by the tail, and then we shall have our religion and our immortality.

While those whom devotion to abstract discussions has rendered unobservant of the facts are too ready to dogmatize on the basis of a few observations.

We deliberately used elements from Brazilian music and from African and Asian music. Now people can hear that but then it sounded so abstract, they couldn't hear it.

When I conform to truth, I do not conform to an abstract principle; I conform to the nature of God.

When individuals and nations have once got in their heads the abstract concept of full-blown liberty, there is nothing like it in its uncontrollable strength.

When money gets too far away from actual, physical, real equity and property it gets too abstract and too distantly derived and then suddenly it's not worth anything anymore. And the same is true of language.

When you're working with an object, you can put in almost anything you want, you can make it abstract.