Famous Quotes & Sayings

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.

Margot Asquith

The power to love what is purely abstract is given to few.

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.

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,

Vidya Balan

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.

Lazaro Hernandez

You have something that exists in your head, and getting that abstract thought from your head into something that actually exists is a difficult process.

Wheelock was a man who would take an abstract concept and make it work.

Zac Goldsmith

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.'

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.

Garry Wills

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.

Elizabeth Warren

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

Jim Henson

Yeah, all the characters in those days were abstract because that was part of the principle that I was working under, that you wanted abstract things.

William Vickrey

This paper was one of my digressions into abstract economics.

Menachem Begin

My colleagues and I have gone in the footsteps of our predecessors since the very first day we were called by our people to care for their future. We went any place, we looked for any avenue, we made any effort to bring about negotiations between Israel and its neighbors, negotiations without which peace remains an abstract desire.

Roy Lichtenstein

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.

Jacques Lacan

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.

Harland Williams

I'd like to explore the more abstract side of people's minds, as opposed to the usual sitcom stuff. I don't want to do the typical sitcom-type humor. I'd want to do stuff like go bowling with pineapples.

David Sanborn

Usually there's some kind of clue, whether it's a rhythmic foundation or sometimes its very abstract - just an emotional kind of landscape - and then you just kind of start someplace.

Octavio Paz

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.

Octavio Paz

Abstract painting seeks to be a pure pictorial language, and thus attempts to escape the essential impurity of all languages: the recourse to signs or forms that have meanings shared by everyone.

Pierre Schaeffer

In contrast, traditional classical music starts from an abstract musical schema. This is then notated and only expressed in concrete sound as a last stage, when it is performed.

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

Rich Sommer

Part of what I love about games is that, even if you're best friends with somebody, it gives you these sort of moments where you get to interact on a completely different level. You all agree to these abstract rules, but there's nobody holding a gun to your head.

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.