Top 250 Abstract Quotes

I don’t like videos that explain the song. I like it to be kind of abstract, like a painting.

I like the fact that music is more abstract.

Much has been written about Trump‘s style of speech, which linguists have said is often unintelligible yet deeply compelling. Orwell‘s famous 1946 essay, ‘Politics and the English Language,’ centers on the use of abstract words, often by politicians, to obscure reality.

The most significant moment in the course of intellectual development, which gives birth to the purely human forms of practical and abstract intelligence, occurs when speech and practical activity, two previously completely independent lines of development, converge.

The man of science, like the man of letters, is too apt to view mankind only in the abstract, selecting in his consideration only a single side of our complex and many-sided being.

Science fiction is a way that I can go into the abstract, go into the imagination, and audiences are still willing to go along for the ride.

Abstract ideas like equality and liberty have a spurious transparency, and can be used to derive pleasing theorems in the manner of Jean–Jacques Rousseau or John Rawls.

America thrives on identity politics, left and right. But France is opposed to the idea. Since the Revolution, the French have enthroned the idea of universalism. All of us must be equal before the law as abstract individuals, and that extends to the arts.

My own physicality, not an abstract idea, makes me a choreographer.

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.

My interest in desperation lies only in that sometimes I find myself having become desperate. Very seldom do I start out that way. I can see of course that, in the abstract, thinking and all activity is rather desperate.

Verse is not written, it is bled; Out of the poet’s abstract head. Words drip the poem on the page; Out of his grief, delight and rage.

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.

The abstract analysis of the world by mathematics and physics rests on the concepts of space and time.

When I was thinking about The Lion King, I said, we have to do what theater does best. What theater does best is to be abstract and not to do literal reality.

Black and white is abstract; color is not. Looking at a black and white photograph, you are already looking at a strange world.

‘Austerity‘ is a real weasel word because it’s an attempt to make something value-based and abstract out of something which, in reality, consists simply of spending cuts.

There is no abstract art. You must always start with something. Afterward you can remove all traces of reality.

And also the new excitement and variety of ways that the abstract expressionists were applying paint. You could put it on as though it were colored air and it would be painting.

Historians of European royalty have written of the king’s ‘two bodies‘ : one mortal and corrupt; the other divine, abstract and timeless.

When I was growing up, nothing unpleasant was shown in the home. And when I was in art school, the only art that was presented to me was Abstract Expressionism. But I was interested in the grim stuff. It seemed more exciting.

It is easier to take a position in the abstract than when it hits home.

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

Do you not see, first, that – as a mental abstract – physical force is directly opposed to morality; and secondly, that it practically drives out of existence the moral forces?

If you live in a democracy, it’s very tiring to be always surrounded by great and high abstract generalisations which are, in fact, the most banal and naive cliches dug out of second-rate movements of the late 19th century.

Delight at having understood a very abstract and obscure system leads most people to believe in the truth of what it demonstrates.

I paint; I draw and paint – I’ve been doing that since I was in third grade, drawing realistically and then changing to abstract art. That was my first creative thing before guitar or comedy.

NASA is my favorite website. The universe with its abstract nature attracts me. The abstract element in my poetry comes from there.

I’m just really impressed by oil paintings – I don’t see how people do it! That’s the style I like: classic oil paintings. Abstract art just isn’t my thing.

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

I admire the abstract expressionists and pop artists so right now I’m referencing American ’60s art and at the same time referencing Japanese manga culture.

The Kevin Abstract project kind of represents being socially awkward in high school, which I’m low-key kind of tired of.

With the Larry Bertlemann portrait, I started with a photograph that I could use for it. I built the drawing’s identity to serve as a graphic identity. After a number of sketches, I went into my own abstract vernacular of drawn lines and shapes to create the composition for the poster design.

When I write plays, I’m already seeing the shapes on stage, of the actors and their interaction, and so on and so forth. I don’t think I’ve ever written one play as an abstract piece, as a literary piece, floating in the air somewhere, to be flushed out later on.

Naturally, underground music often gravitates toward experimentation and the abstract. That’s understandable, and more often than not, it feels great to dive into a difficult album and swim a few laps.

Wisdom is the abstract of the past, but beauty is the promise of the future.

In the abstract conception of universal wrong, all concrete responsibility vanishes.

I want kids to live through this character I’ve created. I want them to say that they are Kevin Abstract because they relate to it that much.

I was welding art from my house, making abstract figures out of metal.

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.

The way in which people talk about climate is just so wonky and so abstract and such a boys’ club that it makes a lot of women just roll their eyes or feel that they are somehow not qualified. I certainly had to fight that feeling in myself in order to write about it.

Writing laws based on an abstract theory, rather than reality, is a dangerous undertaking.

I don’t like the word ‘abstractions’ very much because most people don’t think in abstractions. That is too difficult for them. They think in stories. And the best stories are not abstract; they are concrete.

Some manufacturers illustrate their advertisements with abstract paintings. I would only do this if I wished to conceal from the reader what I was advertising.

We have wasted our spirit in the regions of the abstract and general just as the monks let it wither in the world of prayer and contemplation.

Living in Beijing, writing about politically sensitive things now and then, you get used to the idea that somebody, somewhere, might be watching. But it is usually an abstract threat.

You can’t buy your privacy back. Because I was already doing OK, and to have this abstract amount of money now, I cannot buy my privacy back.

Where I’m at in my relationship with my wife or my family and life in general, I feel like it all comes out in the music. Hopefully, it’s always there, but in an ambiguous and abstract way and not real straightforward.

I did take some value out of looking at the extreme simplicity of implementation that the tight resource limits required. I do feel that modern games are often abstracted a lot more than is really necessary, and it leads to robustness issues.

I was a really lousy artist as a kid. Too abstract expressionist; or I’d draw a big ram‘s head, really messy. I’d never win painting contests. I remember losing to a guy who did a perfect Spiderman.

Up until 35 I had a slightly skewed world view. I honestly believed everybody in the world wanted to make abstract paintings, and people only became lawyers and doctors and brokers and things because they couldn’t make abstract paintings.

I don’t know why you’d want to say your work comes from nature, because art is related to perception, not nature. All abstract artists try to tell you that what they do comes from nature, and I’m always trying to tell you that what I do is completely abstract. We’re both saying something we want to be true.

Color is for me the purest form of expression, the purest abstract reality.

The Internet is just an abstract place. Sure, I’ve become part of that in some way, but it’s hard for me to wrap my head around a lot of it. I prefer just to kind of stay out of it.

To really be on stage and not know what you’re going to say, and to be able to say something that makes people laugh, or do something that’s sort of abstract or off the beaten path and have people connect to it by just putting your ideas together, that really makes me happy.

I think that the idea of a war on an abstract noun is unacceptable.

America used to be proud of abstraction, and we have fallen away from it. The future depends on people trying to promote that abstract thinking. Not just in relation to music and jazz and the arts, but the economy, social strife, tension between people.

In many museums, you see one of this and one of that. You gain an understanding of what Abstract Expressionism or Minimalism is, but you aren’t given the chance to appreciate the mind of an artist.

‘Europe ’72’ was a super influential record full of fantastic songs and amazing experimental musicianship. I always valued both of those aspects in what Sonic Youth has done through the years – being able to get very abstract and very concrete within the same song.

Mathematicians are stiff abstract guys. They’ll tell you they don’t need the physical world. But then when I show them my bubbles they’re like little children.

Exclusively of the abstract sciences, the largest and worthiest portion of our knowledge consists of aphorisms: and the greatest and best of men is but an aphorism.

Just as pure abstract art is not dogmatic, neither is it decorative.

You make knowledge relevant to life and you make it important for children to learn things that will really relate to things going on in their lives, and not abstract.

It’s not that prison makes you shed your abstract notions. On the contrary, it pares them down to their most succinct articulations. Prison is, indeed, a translation of your metaphysics, ethics, sense of history and whatnot into the compact terms of your daily deportment.

There are all kinds of features that will become part of cell phones that will help us offload the more laborious things of life and let us focus on doing the things humans do well, like abstract thinking and creating.

To those who have exhausted politics, nothing remains but abstract thought.

I don’t like to move abstract theoretical policies that, on a white paper, sound good. If I wanted to do that, I’d be a professor.

The text loses its virginity simply by being staged: it’s no longer the abstract ideal version; it’s an event.

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

It is dangerous when you start calling people from one part of the world terrorists or fanatic, and you reduce them to some abstract notion. If evil has a geographical place, and if the evil has a name, that is the beginning of fascism. Real life is not this way. You have fanatics and narrow-minded people everywhere.

I quite like the idea – just as an abstract idea – of 12 people’s collective life experience and wisdom being this formidable thing. People say juries can be led – I think 12 people from different backgrounds, different races, different genders, different ages, it’s hard to hoodwink.

This paper was one of my digressions into abstract economics.

I don’t care if Margot is a Dame of the British Empire or older than myself. For me she represents eternal youth; there is an absolute musical quality in her beautiful body and phrasing. Because we are sincere and gifted, an intense abstract love is born between us every time we dance together.

We shall suffer no attachment to literature, no taste for abstract discussion, no love of purely intellectual theories, to seduce us from our devotion to the cause of the oppressed, the down trodden, the insulted and injured masses of our fellow men.

‘Look at Me’ started with Rockford, Illinois and New York and the question of how much image culture was changing our inner lives. That’s an abstract idea; you don’t think that’s going to be a rocking work of fiction, but it seemed to fuse in a way that was interesting.

‘Woman on the Plaza,’ with its distinct horizon, snow-like surfaces, wintry wall, stunning sunlight, sharp shadows, and hurrying figure, would become the most biographical of my photographs – an abstract image of the landscape and life of northern Ohio where I grew up and first practiced photography.

I don’t have a huge amount of gear, but on the software side, I have a number of plug-in chains that act as abstracted versions of real instruments.

When Sean and I are old, we’re just going to compose weird abstract symphonies.

Wikipedians believe (and I do, too) that bits, being abstract, will outlast paper.

I am at war… with the principal personage of traditional philosophy, that abstract subject who masquerades as everyone and anyone, but is really a male subject in disguise.

It was the point where things became much more abstract and less literal than in the bulk of the film, which was hardcore rockets and space and planets – all a fairly straightforward evolution from what I had been doing before.

Of course, it is the case that conservatism as I envisage it distances itself always from abstract conceptions and tries to find the concrete reality.

Evil is the product of the ability of humans to make abstract that which is concrete.

We live in an age when the traditional great subjects – the human form, the landscape, even newer traditions such as abstract expressionism – are daily devalued by commercial art.

I am sure I was an evolutionist in the abstract, or by the quality and complexion of my mind, before I read Darwin, but to become an evolutionist in the concrete, and accept the doctrine of the animal origin of man, has not for me been an easy matter.

Idealism is no good. Any concrete dedication to an abstract condition results in unpleasant things like wars.

There are things that I don’t like to talk about directly. There are relationships that I am in and have been in that I’ve written about in a slightly more abstract way, talking about how it affected me but not so much dealing with the other people involved.

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.

Many billboards and magazine ads have resorted to showing isolated body parts rather than full-body portraits of models using or wearing products. This style of photography, known in the industry as abstract representation, allows the viewer to see himself in the advertisement, rather than the model.

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 wars of the future will be fought by computer technicians and by lawyers and high-altitude specialists, and that may mean war will be increasingly abstract, hard to think about and hard to control.

Arab civilizations had been of an abstract nature, moral and intellectual rather than applied; and their lack of public spirit made their excellent private qualities futile. They were fortunate in their epoch: Europe had fallen barbarous; and the memory of Greek and Latin learning was fading from men’s minds.

When I used to do abstract paintings at school, like everyone else, the tutor said these would make great curtains. I would always neglect the formal stuff that was going on by using colour, because colour kind of came naturally to me.

I personally don’t care for abstract art. I have always felt, ‘To each his own.’ There’s art out there for everybody.

Literal cleanliness and orderliness can release us from abstract cognitive and affective distress – just consider how, during moments where life seems to be spiraling out of control, it can be calming to organize your clothes, clean the living room, get the car washed.

I feel like there’s a lot of albums that are like ‘woo! we’re young, let’s have fun‘ and there’s a lot of albums that are abstract, with mature lyrics.

I loathe when architects only analyze architecture in intellectual, nonvisual ways. I really love direct response, and that’s very pop. I don’t want to discuss abstract transparencies with a bunch of kooks.

I think my comedy’s probably the same as my art, which is kind of abstract, impressionist, emotional. You create an emotion and then you knock it down. You take something the way people are expecting it to go, and then give it a different conclusion.

Only when all children are in a book-loving environment will they achieve literacy, yes, but a lot more: a confidence in handling abstract ideas, an understanding of a multiplicity of viewpoint and the complexity and diversity of human interaction that comes through reading widely and often.

I always knew the French had a penchant for criticism and abstract thought. Usually, that just meant they complained a lot.

The good thing I will say about the Chicago School is that it was always about the world, not about the abstract.

I am 100 per cent Virgo, stubborn, over-organised, slightly abstracted from the rest of the world.

I know that when I finish a drawing, my anxiety level decreases. The realistic drawings are a way of pinning down an idea. I don’t want to loose it. With the abstract drawings, when I’m feeling loose, I can slip into the unconscious.

Christianity becomes just a set of things you believe in. It’s almost an intellectual kind of abstract issue.

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.

For my own part, I abandon the ethics of duty to the Hegelian critique with no regrets; it would appear to me, indeed, to have been correctly characterized by Hegel as an abstract thought, as a thought of understanding.

I mean, I find things that happened in real life to be the funniest – things that you observe instead of crazy abstract things, you know.

In a clown, we see what we do that makes us laugh and cry. I kept the white face, the tradition of the Pierrot. My clown became a romantic and stylized figure. I wanted to be an abstract and concrete figure, a symbol of humanity.

To realize life in the abstract as noble or beautiful or humane, to set it forth so with radiance upon it, that is civilization in the arts. Shakespeare is the chief modern example of this supreme faculty of mankind.

I have this very abstract idea in my head. I wouldn’t even want to call it stand-up, because stand-up conjures in one’s mind a comedian with a microphone standing onstage under a spotlight telling jokes to an audience. The direction I’m going in is eventually, you won‘t know if it’s a joke or not.

I do not see scales as abstract.

Musical composition, about which I know little, is a complicated art, and some contemporary music may be the equivalent of a complex abstract painting.

Describing comic sensibility is near impossible. It’s sort of an abstract silliness, that sometimes the joke isn’t the star.

Abstract sympathy with the working class as an economic entity is easy, but the feeling can vanish on contact with actual members of the group, who often arrive with disturbing beliefs and powerful resentments – who might not sound or look like people urban progressives want to know.

I think about the structure, sure. I think about what’s going to happen, and how it’s going to happen, and the pace. But I think if I stop to think about it in an abstract sense, I feel very daunted. I just try to enter into the story and feel my way through it. It’s a very murky, intuitive way of going about it.

I loved the idea of Bowie as an artist, with his Burroughsian cut-up technique, creating these undecipherable, abstract songs, where we all projected our own meanings onto his jarring word choices and unexpected chord changes.

I’ve always written about people who have very abstracted in a certain way. I write about scientists and artists and musicians. I write about people who live in their heads who are very obsessed about a certain set of details in the physical world.

When you make a painting, even abstract, there is always a sort of necessary filling-in.

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

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.

A lot of the lyrical ideas do have a lot of meaning in a way, although it is somewhat abstracted.

Thinking – in particular abstract thinking, which most of us are introduced to through the study of mathematics and literature – helps us learn that we can become problem solvers.

Mankind is divided into rich and poor, into property owners and exploited; and to abstract oneself from this fundamental division; and from the antagonism between poor and rich means abstracting oneself from fundamental facts.

Abstract anger is great for rhetorical carrying on. You can go on endlessly about the post office, but it doesn’t mean you’re mad at your mailman.

I think most people, when they think about the Black Panther Party, they think in very abstract, caricatured terms. They think about black fists in the air, but they don’t think about the actual people, and the families, and the relationships.

It is difficult to talk about fashion in the abstract, without a human body before my eyes, without drawings, without a choice of fabric – without a practical or visual reality.

One thus sees that a new kind of theory is needed which drops these basic commitments and at most recovers some essential features of the older theories as abstract forms derived from a deeper reality in which what prevails in unbroken wholeness.

Voice work is fun. But about three-quarters of the things you enjoy about acting are just not there. You’re not working with another actor; you’re not working with an audience. You’re just working with a bunch of writers and a microphone. It’s very abstract.

Man is alone everywhere. But the solitude of the Mexican, under the great stone night of the high plateau that is still inhabited by insatiable gods, is very different from that of the North American, who wanders in an abstract world of machines, fellow citizens and moral precepts.

What is important, then, is not that the critic should possess a correct abstract definition of beauty for the intellect, but a certain kind of temperament, the power of being deeply moved by the presence of beautiful objects.

I would admit that poetry is something more than mere communication and that if that ‘something more’ could be abstracted from the whole, it might well prove to be that which makes the whole a poem.

In every respect, fantasy is like doing abstract paintings.

Those who incline to very strictly utilitarian views may perhaps feel that the peculiar powers of the Analytical Engine bear upon questions of abstract and speculative science rather than upon those involving everyday and ordinary human interests.

I guess my experience with some stuff is kind of abstract.

I wanted to be an abstract painter, but I was rotten at it.

Child poverty is more than an abstract problem to me. It’s something I know all too much about.

I never learned to verbalize an abstract musical concept. No thank you. The whole point of being a serious musician is to avoid verbalization whenever you can.

I’ve always felt that sort of in the abstract, open-source is the right thing to do for a lot of the kinds of things that we do. There are a variety of issues that make it a very complex discussion as to whether it actually works as a business.

I finished up my graduate degree in quantum mechanics, but underwent a bit of a personal crisis, recognizing that I didn’t want to do that for the rest of my life. It was too abstract, too far removed from human concerns.

I grew up in the ’90s and remember the lyrics back then were so abstract and open to interpretation. That always drove me crazy.

There is no gender to my music. There’s no male or female voice, no trite lyrics or poetry. It’s much more abstract, so it lives with you longer.

I’m a fan of genre in the abstract, but at best, perhaps all we can really say when we talk about genre is that we’re talking about an umbrella that covers a kind of story with certain elements.

The meaning of words has become so blurred by past usage that ‘abstract’ is identified with ‘vague‘ and ‘unreal,’ and ‘inwardness’ with a sort of traditional beatitude… The conception of the word ‘plastic‘ has also been limited by individual interpretations.

If the abstract rights of man will bear discussion and explanation, those of women, by a parity of reasoning, will not shrink from the same test.

Height, width, and depth are the three phenomena which I must transfer into one plane to form the abstract surface of the picture, and thus to protect myself from the infinity of space.

Success is a completely abstract thing – it has no bearing on daily life, family matters, the matter of artistic creation, but it can affect grace, and if I lose that, I really have gained nothing from success.

I have enormous affection for Bill Simmons and not just in an abstract way but a very specific way.

Praise or blame has but a momentary effect on the man whose love of beauty in the abstract makes him a severe critic on his own works.

Even the recognition of an individual whom we see every day is only possible as the result of an abstract idea of him formed by generalization from his appearances in the past.

I believe it is my job to do everything I can so that everyone in our society feels safe, feels that justice is not an abstract concept but a fact of life for all Americans.

I just want to be Kevin Abstract and exist and help as many people as possible who are struggling with whatever they’re struggling with.

Movement is expressive. I’ve never denied that. I don’t think there’s such a thing as abstract dance.

History is representational, while time is abstract; both of these artifices may be found in museums, where they span everybody’s own vacancy.

I write what I write in the way that I write it. I’m not being abstract, you know. I’m talking about something that, you know, is a part of my life.

Science fiction in particular is often assumed to be about the future, or about some abstract technological or philosophical idea, or just about ‘adventure,’ but writers can’t build worlds out of nothing. We use bits and pieces of the real world to assemble our fictional ones.

I think we’re much smarter than we were. Everybody knows that abstract art can be art, and most people know that they may not like it, even if they understand there’s another purpose to it.

Each department of knowledge passes through three stages. The theoretic stage; the theological stage and the metaphysical or abstract stage.

I think you have to let go of this idea that you can be precious about everything, and let it be the abstract mess that it is.

I’m a teacher, so much of what I’m doing remains in the abstract. But I also support a lot of educational initiatives that support kids to really get out there and work hard in their communities. But I also think that we need poets in our country to inspire.

Animals represent the abstract notion of acceptance. Living with these funny creatures – you kind of have to accept them. It’s like a test in a way.

I say a murder is abstract. You pull the trigger and after that you do not understand anything that happens.

The idea of being published was such an abstract thing in the beginning. It wasn’t even an option in my mind.

But this emphasis would be lavished in vain, if it served, in your opinion, only to abstract a general type from phenomena whose particularity in our work would remain the essential thing for you, and whose original arrangement could be broken up only artificially.

Balanchine was just able to strike the balance between literal narrative and abstract dance.

It’s difficult in the abstract to appreciate that those with morally objectionable viewpoints can still be good people.

The level on which Japan seems to have picked up on my music seems to be on a more abstract level.

To me, it seems more realistic to my thought process when things feel a little scattered in the lyrics. Being disjointed is not that abstract of a thing when I think about how my brain works – I feel like it’s almost more realistic. That’s how my brain works.

Of all the arts, music is really the most 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.

Conservatives don’t love business for some abstract reason. We love it because of what it offers our children. Hope.

Abstract painting is abstract. It confronts you. There was a reviewer a while back who wrote that my pictures didn’t have any beginning or any end. He didn’t mean it as a compliment, but it was.

Film is abstract, not definite. It is a dream.

Most professional women I know – myself included – long since gave up looking for a rulebook or a roadmap; we make it up as we go along. Every day presents a new choice, a new challenge, which makes long-term career planning seem like an especially abstract exercise.

Think of an abstract painting as very, very low relief – a thing, not a picture.

My music is rather abstract and maybe even strange-sounding for some people, so maybe that’s why it’s been used in so many horror movies and thrillers.

Across a range of inferences involving not just language but mathematics, logic problems, and spatial reasoning, sleep has been shown to enhance the formation and understanding of abstract relations, so much so that people often wake having solved a problem that was unsolvable the night before.

While massive datasets may feel very abstract, they are intricately linked to physical place and human culture. And places, like people, have their own individual character and grain.

I was a student at Harvard, and that’s where I learned about so-called avant-garde music. Jackson Pollock, abstract expressionism and painting were well known at this time.

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.

Americans tend to endorse the use of physician-assisted suicide and euthanasia when the question is abstract and hypothetical.

Someone who copies a Van Gogh does not therefore become Van Gogh, and the same would go for Mozart or anyone else who contributed something that was original. Certainly in the way that I described visualizing numbers in abstract, meaningful shapes.

From Shakespeare to Robi Thakur, everyone has written stories about people and incidents around them. There is no creativity minus reality irrespective of how flowery or abstract you make it.

People tend to have a knee-jerk response to the word ‘philosophy’. You imagine it’s abstract and inaccessible.

Those damned Abstract Expressionists. They were a major problem. Because the critics adored them to such an extent, reams and reams, pages and pages of articles about Abstract Expressionists, when we came along, we were just not taken seriously at all.

I play only classical music. My pianos are my only big indulgence, but they’re a necessity. When I’m playing the piano is literally the only time I can be completely abstract and disconnected from the regular world and yet be connected – to my music.

No nude, however abstract, should fail to arouse in the spectator some vestige of erotic feeling, even if it be only the faintest shadow – and if it does not do so it is bad art and false morals.

I took physics, and lo and behold, there’s a lot of physics in ‘Lost.’ I think for most people, liberal arts educations are more abstract, but for me, it’s been a chance to apply the things I’ve learned more directly. I also took some Folklore and Mythology classes, and I think that a lot of that influenced me.

I had never thought that I would be involved in narrative structures. As a young guy, I was more interested in abstract modeling. But as I got older, I began to see that there was no reason to limit myself to any intellectual or conceptual postulate, when in fact I’m a professional student of music.

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

O reason, reason, abstract phantom of the waking state, I had already expelled you from my dreams, now I have reached a point where those dreams are about to become fused with apparent realities: now there is only room here for myself.

‘Kraken’ is set in London and has a lot of London riffs, but I think it’s more like slightly dreamlike, slightly abstract London. It’s London as a kind of fantasy kingdom.

Americans are willing to cheer on politicians who denounce bureaucratic overreach and job-killing red tape in abstract terms. But they turn out to like specific regulations against toxic chemicals in their drinking water.

I think the two are kind of synonymous for me; songwriting is like my form of diary making. It’s how I process the world. Without doing that, I feel kind of lost. The characters that I play often come out in the songs and the challenges that they face, albeit in an abstract way.

The easiest way for me to tell someone what I do is to say that I’m a non-musician who practises and produces music. I don’t have a theoretical language for music. I have this abstract dream language.

Everybody just wants to appreciate time as it’s passing, to be in the moment. It’s the hardest thing to do. You’re either in the unknown future that you’re working toward, or you’re in the past that becomes a little abstract.

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.

The idea of being Treasury secretary in the abstract appealed to me, but my initial inclination was that it wasn’t right for me to take that step.

People who have grown up in a world where this was not a concern and suddenly start hearing about climate change – it’s very difficult. It’s a very, very abstract concept. So we need to work on making it very educational and very, very clear, in very simple terms.

If members of Congress were to vote to allow a military action, they might then share the blame if the mission were to go wrong. So they demand in the abstract that presidents ask their approval for going to war but in practice prefer to let presidents bear the burden alone.

I want Pinterest to be human. The Internet’s still so abstract… To me, boards are a very human way of looking at the world.

In my view, the most damaging evils that are perpetrated upon us are through some abstract notion about good, where we’re willing to sacrifice individuals in the present for some great vision of an improved or perfect future.

Let us note that art – even on an abstract level – has never been confined to ‘idea’; art has always been the ‘realized‘ expression of equilibrium.

There is certainly a part of my filmmaking that harkens to a more simpler commercial kind of taste, but then with this there’s certainly a kind of avant-garde, abstract, existential element to it.

Dancing is the personification of music, and music is an abstract expression of the human spirit. But still it’s the act of communication, of making one feel. Otherwise it would just be gymnastics.

I’m a big fan of horror films, particularly ‘Friday the 13th.’ It’s one of the only genres that weaves abstract experimental techniques into the mainstream; having to be spooky requires a little more creativity.

Although the theory of relativity makes the greatest of demands on the ability for abstract thought, still it fulfills the traditional requirements of science insofar as it permits a division of the world into subject and object (observer and observed) and, hence, a clear formulation of the law of causality.

Money is human happiness in the abstract; he, then, who is no longer capable of enjoying human happiness in the concrete devotes himself utterly to money.

The narrative oftentimes is that everything that comes out of the hood is ‘real,’ and so I thought, ‘I’ll base it on the absurd, the not real. I’ll twist the idea of real on its head and see if I can get away with it. I’ll make paintings that come not from a place but through an abstract gaze.’

Change means movement. Movement means friction. Only in the frictionless vacuum of a nonexistent abstract world can movement or change occur without that abrasive friction of conflict.

Abstracted hatred is incredibly potent. There’s never the risk of having it challenged by the reality of living human beings.

I couldn’t be Susan Sontag. I’m not very good with abstract thought. I always just take to the emotional core of me.

I’m not satisfied sitting in just the world of abstract work.

I think what I was unconsciously expressing in ‘Black Rainbow‘ was a very abstract and metaphorical grief, in the way I had suppressed my grief about my mother dying. In retrospect I realise I started writing ‘Mandy’ as a sort of antidote to that, to sort of express those emotions, to purge that grief.

When you’re trying to solve a problem on a new product type, you become completely focused on problems that seem a number of steps removed from the main product. That problem solving can appear a little abstract, and it is easy to lose sight of the product.

To say it another way, thinking, however abstract, originates in an embodied subjectivity, at once overdetermined and permeable to contingent events.

My aim is for every song to have a purpose – for you to be able to say, ‘This song is about this.’ But love and heartbreak are some of the most abstract subjects.

Mother liked beauty wherever she found it, and she found it in many different places, both in nature and in contemporary art. And that’s where they pretty much parted company. Father… anything that was abstract would to him automatically be not very good.

The surrealists, and the modern movement in painting as a whole, seemed to offer a key to the strange postwar world with its threat of nuclear war. The dislocations and ambiguities, in cubism and abstract art as well as the surrealists, reminded me of my childhood in Shanghai.

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

I think, for a lot of people, men or women, it’s easy to have things not affect you because, it doesn’t affect you. So to be a better ally, you have to look at it as if it’s someone you know instead of this abstract person you’ve never met.

I’m so fond of abstract design in the style of Vanderbilt and David Hicks and that whole 1970s era. They took the 1930s and gave it a bit of technicolour.

I’ve said this before – and I mean it strongly – an abstract concept or a moral issue has to be connected to feeling. If we don’t believe it somehow viscerally, we don’t really take it in.

Decarbonising our energy system is not some abstract regulatory requirement. It is an essential responsibility that we hold towards our children and grandchildren as the only way to effectively counter the threat of climate change.

There’s an interesting contrast between born Catholics and converts. Converts are often much more rule-directed. Catholicism isn’t something that they breathed in from their childhood, so they think that if you don’t toe the line on abstract doctrine you can’t be part of the Church.

I always say that modernization is not an abstract thing; it’s a very specific task.

Being design-led means designers take ideas from the abstract to the concrete, from potential to real value.

Music is so abstract; it is a combination of words and melody.

I am searching for abstract ways of expressing reality, abstract forms that will enlighten my own mystery.

I grew up in a suburb of Baltimore with an extremely high concentration of Jewish families – where the Levys and Cohens in the high school yearbook went on for pages, where I could count far more temples than I ever could churches. Anti-Semitism, in our cultural biodome, was mostly an abstract concept.

I came to New York, and it was fascinating and intimidating and yielding, and all the stuff it’s supposed to be. But whatever the abstract essence I was seeking, I couldn’t find exactly that.

Abstract Expressionism – the first American movement to have a worldwide influence – was remarkably short-lived: It heated up after World War II and was all but done for by 1960 (although visit any art school today and you’ll find a would-be Willem de Kooning).

I like connecting the abstract to the concrete. There’s a tension in that. I believe the reader or listener should be able to enter the poem as a participant. So I try to get past resolving poems.

Modern man has a very abstract idea of what a wood is. I guess that if you stopped anyone on the street and asked them what a wood actually was, they would see it as a place where big trees grow.

For people of color – especially African Americans – the idea that racist cops might frame members of their community is no abstract notion, let alone an exercise in irrational conspiracy theorizing. Rather, it speaks to a social reality about which blacks are acutely aware.

The truth is, the difference between a studio photographer and a photojournalist is the same as the difference between a political cartoonist and an abstract painter; the only thing the two have in common is the blank page. The jobs entail different talents and different desires.

Honest talk about the deficit is risky. Voters are more enthusiastic about the abstract notion of deficit reduction than about the painful details of accomplishing it.

I paint abstract expressions.

Absurdity is my favorite brand of humor because deep down inside, in our subconscious, it’s all surrealism. It’s all abstract. The world is the surrealism, the absurdity, the humor – it all just overlaps.

Whitman was Emerson translated from the abstract into the concrete.

My 2020 Vision for India is to transform it into a developed nation. That cannot be abstract; it is a lifeline.

It’s so hard to do the right thing with a pen and a piece of paper and a set of abstract thoughts.

Developing characters is a strange thing. In the beginning they are abstract and I wonder how to move on from there.

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.

At that point it certainly would be called abstract. That is to say, you had a model and there’d be one or two or three people there drawing the model but otherwise you had abstractions all around the room, even though the model was in front of you.

None of the abstract concepts comes closer to fulfilled utopia than that of eternal peace.

I hardly need to abstract things, for each object is unreal enough already, so unreal that I can only make it real by means of painting.

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

My thoughts about God are vague and abstract. My connection with the energy of the universe is shaky.

There’s no way that scientists can ever rule out religion, or even have anything significant to say about the abstract idea of a divine creator.

If you’re a painter, you don’t go, ‘Abstract’s really selling, so that’s what I’m going to do.’ If you’re really truly an artist, you have to think what you’re meant to paint.