Famous Quotes & Sayings

What you're seeing right now with Katrina mirrors a lot of what the government does not do for families of Guard and Reserve soldiers: Throwing money at abstract concepts they love to do that but they really don't know how many of these families are suffering,

Willem de Kooning

Even an abstract form has to have a likeness.

Wassily Kandinsky

The more abstract is form, the more clear and direct its appeal.

Restoring the canyon is no longer an abstract notion now that people can actually experience its beauty.

Our language is polarized. Concrete words are usually the language of poets. Abstract words are usually the language of politicians.

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.

Jack Straw

I really don't think it would be wise to speculate in an abstract way about the circumstances in which it might be on the agenda.

Brittany Howard

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.

In 1971, I put together the 'Johnny Face' drawing as a concept, with the words as part of an image in a circle. Combining my abstract drawing with the headline 'Crazy World Ain't It' created an emblem and became a button.

In another 10,000 or 20,000 years, I think the human brain may acquire a form that is quite different than the human brain today. Not necessarily in its shape, which may remain relatively the same. But the function may be different. It may be, on average, a little smarter. Or it may acquire certain skills that in its current form it isn't well-equipped to handle -- advanced cognitive abilities such as abstract reasoning. We don't really know for sure how -- but we are still evolving.

Damon Galgut

I'm fascinated by how much has changed from one generation to another. There are young people growing up now for whom apartheid is just a distant memory and the idea of military service is an abstract notion.

Lynsey Addario

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.

The courses I took were very rigorous and demanding, teaching me how to draw from real life. I started to get bored with that mode of expression as I found it to be too repetitive. I was looking to push myself to do something different and abstract art seemed to be the perfect outlet for that.

Everybody is for peace. Nobody says they're against it. But we really wanted to take this abstract idea and put a human face to it, and let people know the idea of peaceful resolution isn't just something that needs to happen on the far side of the globe. It's something that needs to happen here too.

It's like communism, in an abstract manner. No matter how many gold medals these Temecula boys give each other, in my opinion, they're afraid of the quality of my wine.

Jason Reitman

Can you design a Rorschach test that's going to make everyone feel something every time - and that looks like a Rorschach test? It's easy to show a picture of a kitten or a car accident. The question is, how abstract can you get and still get the audience to feel something when they don't know what's happening to them?

Nancy Gibbs

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.

Neil Young

Freedom is an abstract offshoot. You can't describe freedom. How can you describe it? I tried and I failed.

John Green

All representations of a thing are inherently abstract.

R. Buckminster Fuller

Relativity is inherently convergent, though convergent toward a plurality of centers of abstract truths.

John Leslie

A painting... is just one image. It allows you to elaborate, dwell on that one picture, go off on it because no further images are forced upon you. But the motion picture is always changing. So what you have to do is create some kind of eye field, an abstract form in a literal sense that tries to emulate what the brain is perceiving, not what the eye is seeing.

Berthold Auerbach

Judaism lives not in an abstract creed, but in its institutions.

The difference from project to project is that departure point. In this case, it was really an abstract idea, an issue of citizenship, but it might be a Chekhov short story or a story from 'The Iliad.' You can really fit anything in there, but what's consistent is that the writer and the director are chosen, the actors are all present before the play begins.

Edmund White

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.

The meaning for the average person watching the ... demonstrations is that this is a very serious movement, a large issue, and it's not going to go away. People now have a face and they have a story that goes along with what they had previously viewed as a pretty abstract concept, illegal immigration.

Al Capp

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

It's extremely important that we bring clarity to this question of 'who's in charge' long in advance of an actual crisis, or else the potential for chaos and delay on the scene will be very real if, God forbid, we are actually confronted by one of these nightmare scenarios. So this is not an abstract argument, ... While the Defense Department will have the legal responsibility to assist civil authorities, when requested, in the event of a serious crisis -- and indeed has resources, troops, and capabilities that no other agency can duplicate -- the new rubric outlined in the National Response Plan clearly identifies the secretary of Homeland Security as the guy at the top making judgments about how the federal government will respond.

Dan Colen

A lot of my work is about what's abstract and what's pictorial. Is it bubblegum, or is it an abstract painting using bubblegum? The energy comes from walking that line and watching things dip this way and that.

Americans are not fighting nor being targeted by an abstract called terrorism, but a growing body of ideological concepts. They need to know what is it they are up against.

It's not some abstract thing, to support the arts, ... It's a very vital part of our lives.

They're not collections based on an abstract definition of pretty, it's all what a sophisticated consumer would find charming.

David Rockefeller

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.

Sophia Amoruso

A big practice in chaos magic is the use of sigils, which are abstract words or symbols you create and embed with your wishes.