Quotes About Abstract

people could not analyse their metaphors if they didn't command an underlying medium of thought that is more abstract than the metaphors themselves.

Sisterly love is, of all sentiments, the most abstract. Nature does not grant it any functions.

Friendship's an abstract of this noble flame, 'Tis love refin'd, and purged from all its dross, 'Tis next to angel's love, if not the same, As strong in passion is, though not so gross.

I love the abstract, delicate, profound, vague, voluptuously wordless sensation of living ecstatically.

The love of the famous, like all strong passions, is quite abstract. Its intensity can be measured mathematically, and it is independent of persons.

Rules? More rules? Really? Isn't life complicated enough, restricting enough, without abstract rules that don't take our unique, individual situations into account?

A creature that cannot think must solely embody its Being. It can merely act out its nature, concretely, in the here-and-now. If it cannot manifest in its behavior what the environment demands while doing so, it will simply die. But that is not true of human beings. We can produce abstracted representations of potential modes of Being. We can produce an idea in the theatre of the imagination. We can test it out against our other ideas, the ideas of

It is through such millennia-long exercise of the imagination that the idea of abstracted moral concepts themselves, with all they entail, developed.

This is life. We build structures to live in. We build families, and states, and countries. We abstract the principles upon which those structures are founded and formulate systems of belief.

The freedom we want, for ourselves and for others, is not an absolute metaphysical, abstract freedom which in practice is inevitably translated into the oppression of the weak; but it is real freedom, possible freedom, which is the conscious community of interests, voluntary solidarity.

To distinguish between the possession of an organ and the urge to use it and to increase its skill by practice, to regard them as two different characteristics of the organism in question, would be an artificial distinction, made possible by an abstract language but having no counterpart in nature.

Any time that we move from personal names to abstract labels or graphs or statistics, we are less in touch with reality and diminished in our capacity to deal with what is best and at the center of life. Yet we are encouraged on every side to do just that.

Lamantia is faith building, encouraging poetry in that it abstractly hugs you by finally capturing the inexpressible. It's an experience similar to relief, reading his poems.

Out of doing all that experimentation with sound I decided I wanted to do it with live musicians. To take repetition, take music fragments and make it live. Musicians would be able to play it and create this kind of abstract fabric of sound.

Climate change - for so long an abstract concern for an academic few - is no longer so abstract. Even the Bush administration's Climate Change Science Programme reports 'clear evidence of human influences on the climate system.'

Through the very culture of representation through form, we have come to see that the abstract - like the mathematical - is actually expressed in and through all things, although not determinately.

A painter, who finds no satisfaction in mere representation, however artistic, in his longing to express his inner life, cannot but envy the ease with which music, the most non-material of the arts today, achieves this end. He naturally seeks to apply the methods of music to his own art.

I don't answer deeply hypothetical questions.

Often, I hear my ideas are more incomprehensible than not.

The metaphor never goes very far, anymore than a curve can long be confused with its tangent.

Money-crimes have an abstract quality. History is laden with the victims of gold, but their remains are odourless.

Pollock also... wanted one to be wrapped in the painting.

El arte abstracto no existe. Siempre tienes que empezar por algo y, luego, puedes eliminar cualquier rasgo de realidad.» Pablo Picasso

The sort of poetry I seek resides in objects man can't touch.