Quotes About Abstract

Psychoanalysts are bent on producing man abstractly, that is to say ideologically, for culture. It is Oedipus who produces man in this fashion and who gives a structure to the false movement of infinite progression and regression

The organism is a diversion of life, whereas abstract line is life itself.

A book itself is a little machine; what is the relation (also measurable) of this literary machine to a war machine, love machine, revolutionary machine, etc.—and an abstract machine that sweeps them along? We have been criticized for overquoting literary authors. But when one writes, the only question is which other machine the literary machine can be plugged into, must be plugged into in order to work.

The death of God has as many meanings as there are forces capable of seizing Christ and making him die; but we are still waiting for the forces or the power which will carry this death to its highest point and make it into something more than an apparent and abstract death.

It is odd how reassuring conversation is, especially on abstract subjects: it seems to normalize the strangest surroundings.

I was worried in the '80s that the best abstract painting had become obsessed with materiality, and painterly gestures and materiality were up against the wall.

The two have to go hand in hand - the atmosphere and the music. I actually get rather worried if I can't see the music first. There always needs to be a mood, a feeling, a story, even if it is abstract. There's got to be a narrative to guide things before they're even created.

In abstract painting, I worried about the limited range of possibilities that, as time went on, became increasingly important to me. I wanted to express or deal with differences that an all-over paint and canvas 'presence' neutralized.

I'm not a natural leader. I'm too intellectual; I'm too abstract; I think too much.

I still remember the realization in college at Flinders University in Australia that mathematics was not just an abstract game of symbols but could be used as a tool to analyze and understand the modern world.

I'm a creature of adaptation. I take advantage of the second and the moment. My comedy breathes; it's not really that predictable. I do have a linear style, but other than that, there's a lot of abstract. I just go off on what I'm thinking. I'm not that topical. I like to talk about me and my experiences.

Calls for the simplification of abstract or allusive art have always come from governments suspicious of artists themselves. This is why totalitarian regimes have always legislated some form of realism.

The stereo played an abstract tone poem by a pianist who sounded as if he had OD'd on Nembutal five minutes before the recording session.

The scripture notion of truth is not an abstract, static, and timeless formula, but is something that comes true in time as the fulfillment of a divine promise. Truth happens in history.

Justice does not exist in the abstract," Epicurus flatly asserts; it is just "a compact to not harm or be harmed";

To judge means: to evaluate a given concrete by reference to an abstract principle or standard. It is not an easy task; it is not a task that can be performed automatically by one's feelings, "instincts" or hunches. It is a task that requires the most precise, the most exacting, the most ruthlessly objective and rational process of thought.

When in the States we had shouted Death to this or that, those deaths seemed to be more symbolic, more abstract, as if we were encouraged by the impossibility of our slogans to insist upon them even more. But in Tehran in 1979, these slogans were turning into reality with macabre precision.

practical people who knew life was too hard to judge each other's choices, too messy to live according to abstract ideals

We only knew, somewhat abstractly, we were going to spend a year integrating our food choices with our family values, which include both "love your neighbor" and "try not to wreck every blooming thing on the planet while you're here.

To function efficiently - to function at all - we must concentrate our effects. Picturing things is bad for business, it is undynamic. It can choke the mind with horror if persisted in. We have graphs and tables and balance sheets and statement of corporate philosophy to help us remain busily and safely in the realm of the abstract and comfort us with a sense of lawful endeavor and lawful profit. And we have maps.

If all abstract thought is metaphorical, and all metaphors are assembled out of biologically basic concepts, then we would have an explanation for the evolution of human intelligence. Human intelligence would be a product of metaphor and combinatorics. Metaphor allows the mind to use a few basic ideas-substance, location, force, goal-to understand more abstract domains. Combinatorics allows a finite set of simple ideas to give rise to an infinite set of complex ones.

you have to acknowledge the possibility that generative metaphors are a major phenomenon in language and an important clue to our cognitive makeup. Abstract ideas are connected in a systematic way to more concrete experiences.

If we dig even deeper to the roots of words, we unearth physical metaphors for still more abstract concepts.

Conceptual metaphors point to an obvious way in which people could learn to reason about knew, abstract concepts. They would notice, or have pointed out to them, a parallel between a physical realm they already understand and a conceptual realm that they don't yet understand. […] They would be the mechanism that the mind uses to understand otherwise inaccessible concepts.