Abstract means literally to draw from or separate. In this sense every artist is abstract. - Richard Diebenkorn
There are two sides to life for every individual: a personal life, in which his freedom exists in proportion to the abstract nature of his interests, and an elemental life within the swarm of humanity, in which a man inevitably follows laws laid down for him. - Leo Tolstoy
The real struggle in political life is between abstract ideas and concrete realities. - Marty Rubin
The real question of government versus private enterprise is argued on too philosophical and abstract a basis. Theoretically, planning may be good. But nobody has ever figured out the cause of government stupidity and until they do (and find the cure) all ideal plans will fall into quicksand. - Richard Feynman
Writing is an abstract art of drawing pictures of the conscious and subconscious mind with words. - Debasish Mridha
Of all the arts, music is really the most abstract. - Leo Ornstein
You can’t build rich lives simply by reading sermons or following abstract rules. Example is the best teacher. Moral improvement occurs most reliably when the heart is warmed, - David Brooks
Darling, you know and I know that everything is straight between us at last beyond the furthest abstract definition in metaphysical terms or any terms you want to specify or sweetly impose or harken back. - John Kerouac
[T]he Enneagram is, at its most abstract, a universal mandala of the self—a symbol of each of us. - Don Richard Riso
You have to have time to be sorry for yourself to be a good Abstract Expressionist. - Robert Rauschenberg
Telescopes and bathyscapes and sonar probes of Scottish lakes, Tacoma Narrows bridge collapse explained with abstract phase-space maps, some x-ray slides, a music score, Minard's Napoleonic war: the most exciting new frontier is charting what's already here. - Randall Munroe
...legal procedure has always tacitly been concerned with human relations, rather than abstract justice, and that consequently in spite of the legal codes it is really the human relations underneath that determine the verdicts in the courts. - James Jones
Her characters tend to err when they reject the grubby and complex circumstances of everyday life for abstract and radical notions. They thrive when they work within the rooted spot, the concrete habit, the particular reality of their town and family. - David Brooks
There is no abstract art. You must always start with something. Afterward you can remove all traces of reality. - Pablo Picasso
Talking about abstract things is important. Having big, wild conversations about concepts like art, music, time travel, and dreams makes it much easier when you’ll eventually need to talk about things like anger, sadness, pain, and love. - Tom Burns
All art is abstract, because art is an abstraction of the truth. - Milford Zornes
Happy is very abstract, you can't touch it. - Julius Veal
Mystical experiences do not necessarily supply new ideas to the mind, rather, they transform what one believes into what one knows, converting abstract concepts, such as divine love, into vivid, personal, realities. - R.M. Jones
Love, he told himself, was open to interpretation like any other abstract indulgence but followed the same principles everywhere, irrespective of everything else. One, either won or lost in love, there was no bridge in between, and he decided he had lost, lost to himself, if not to her. - Faraaz Kazi
A great poet can give wings to abstract thoughts that touch a reader’s mind with the ecstasy of joy. - Debasish Mridha
The longer you look at an object, the more abstract it becomes, and, ironically, the more real. - Lucian Freud
Music is the most abstract of the arts; dance, the most concrete. - Marty Rubin
To abstract is to draw out the essence of a matter. To abstract in art is to separate certain fundamentals from irrelevant material which surrounds them. - Ben Shahn
Philosophy is the abstract art of thoughts and perceptions that form colors of words and languages that paint the canvas of our minds. - Debasish Mridha
It is only through fiction and the dimension of the imaginary that we can learn something real about individual experience. Any other approach is bound to be general and abstract. - Nicola Chiaromonte
Life can only be experienced in myriad of intricate forms, but can be understood only in abstract.Here/Now/Present is the doorway to abstract - the divine nothingness - Rashmit Kalra
Life’s contentment is like an abstract edifice with a domed ceiling of insanity - Munia Khan
The fact is, the old clich%uFFFDs work for us in abstract terms, but they never work out in real life quite the same way. Life is messy; clich%uFFFDs are clean and tidy. - Hugh Macleod
I would put myself in the attitude to look in the eye an abstract truth, and I cannot. I blench and withdraw on this side and on that. I seem to know what he meant who said, No man can see God face to face and live. - Ralph Waldo Emerson
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. - Abhijit Naskar
What really alarms me about President Bush's 'War on Terrorism' is the grammar. How do you wage war on an abstract noun? How is 'Terrorism' going to surrender? It's well known, in philological circles, that it's very hard for abstract nouns to surrender. - Terry Jones
Your art is so abstract that I can only see it through my mind’s eye and touch it through my heart. - Debasish Mridha
There is no branch of mathematics, however abstract, which may not some day be applied to phenomena of the real world. - Nicholas Lobachevsky
When I examine myself and my methods of thought, I come to the conclusion that the gift of fantasy has meant more to me than any talent for abstract, positive thinking. - Albert Einstein
Five senses; an incurably abstract intellect; a haphazardly selective memory; a set of preconceptions and assumptions so numerous that I can never examine more than minority of them - never become conscious of them all. How much of total reality can such an apparatus let through? - C. S. Lewis
The elements are a way to define what abstract is; and abstract is a taught as like any other than ,what to think? and how to think? and you may begin.. - Jerril Thomas Abraham
Mathematics expresses values that reflect the cosmos, including orderliness, balance, harmony, logic, and abstract beauty. - Deepak Chopra
So long as atrocities remain remote, abstract, they will be tolerated, even by decent people. - Howard Zinn
It places value on experience versus intellectual understanding. I saw a lot of people contemplating things but it didn't seem to lead to too many places. I got very interested in people who had discovered something more significant than an intellectual, abstract understanding. - Steve Jobs
Rightness of limitation is essential for growth of reality.Unlimited possibility and abstract creativity can procure nothing. The limitation, and the basis arising from what is already actual, are both of them necessary and interconnected. - Alfred North Whitehead
The physical world is entirely abstract and without actuality apart from its linkage to consciousness. - Arthur Stanley Eddington
proved to the world that even a woman can accomplish something in the most rigorous and abstract of sciences and for that reason would well have deserved an honorary degree. Carl Friedrich Gauß - Sophie Germain
Language is not an abstract construction of the learned, or of dictionary makers, but is something arising out of the work, needs, ties, joys, affections, tastes, of long generations of humanity, and has its bases broad and low, close to the ground.
We believe more readily in the abstract application of God's promises than we do in their application to us personally. - Matt Chandler
Like Aristotle, conservatives generally accept the world as it is; they distrust the politics of abstract reason – that is, reason divorced from experience. - Benjamin Wiker
One act of beneficence, one act of real usefulness, is worth all the abstract sentiment in the world. Sentiment is a disgrace, instead of an ornament, unless it lead us to good actions. - Ann Radcliffe
I wish to approach truth as closely as is possible, and therefore I abstract everything until I arrive at the fundamental quality of objects. - Piet Mondrian