Abstract Quotes

Many attempts have been made by writers on art and poetry to define beauty in the abstract, to express it in the most general terms, to find some universal formula for it.
Walter Pater

Beauty, Art, Poetry

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.
Walter Pater

Beauty, Power, Beautiful

It makes no difference whether a work is naturalistic or abstract; every visual expression follows the same fundamental laws.
Hans Hofmann

Work, Same, Makes

What goes on in abstract art is the proclaiming of aesthetic principles... It is in our own time that we have become aware of pure aesthetic considerations. Art never can be imitation.
Hans Hofmann

Time, Art, Become

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.
Giorgio Armani

Human, Reality, Eyes

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

Time, History, May

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.
Willem de Kooning

Thinking, Find, Sometimes

It is about this very abstract sense of displacement that he feels the moment he turns off the television.
Atom Egoyan

Moment, Sense, Off

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.
David Bohm

Reality, Older, Theory

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.
Michael Ignatieff

War, Future, Hard

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

Knowledge, Through, Three

The big shock of my life was Abstract Expressionism - Pollock, de Kooning, those guys. It changed my work. I was an academically trained student, and suddenly you could pour paint, smear it on, broom it on!
LeRoy Neiman

Life, Work, Big

The more horrifying this world becomes, the more art becomes abstract.
Ellen Key

Art, Horrifying, Becomes

Let me first say that I don't think the millennium target of cutting global poverty in half is an impossible or abstract target. I think it is a real and achievable goal.
Gro Harlem Brundtland

Real, Goal, Impossible

I like the fact that music is more abstract.
Bryan Ferry

They are imbeciles who call my work abstract. That which they call abstract is the most realistic, because what is real is not the exterior but the idea, the essence of things.
Constantin Brancusi

Work, Real, Idea

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

Reality, Color, Expression

Northern white people love the Negro in a sort of abstract way, as a race; through a sense of justice, charity, and philanthropy, they will liberally assist in his elevation.
James Weldon Johnson

Love, Justice, Through

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.
Robert Rauschenberg

Put, Excitement, Though

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.
Max Beckmann

Picture, Three, Space

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

Wanted, Painter, Rotten

I love the idea of leaving some of the original abstract thought in, because the problem is that when you pick up a pen you become a snob, your own worse critic. You edit yourself in a way that is non-creative.
Glen Hansard

Love, Yourself, Thought

She was good at playing abstract confusion in the same way that a midget is good at being short.
Clive James

Good, Same, Short

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.
Paul Ricoeur

Thought, Regrets, Ethics

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.
Kerry Washington

Black, Party, Air

Of all the arts, music is really the most abstract.
Leo Ornstein

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.
Roy Lichtenstein

Art, May, Understand

I felt the most intense pleasure in piercing the stone in order to make an abstract form and space; quite a different sensation from that of doing it for the purpose of realism.
Barbara Hepworth

Different, Purpose, Order

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.
Kenneth Clark

Art, Bad, Feeling

'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.
China Mieville

London, Fantasy, Kingdom

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