A Quotes
Browse famous quotes beginning with A. This page is a child index of the full Popular Quotes A-Z directory.
“Abstract white cirrus clouds streaked across the sky. The cool breeze rustled the leaves in the trees and disturbed the ones settled on the ground. Anaya couldn’t help but see a metaphor in that.”
Source: The Watchmaker's Doctor
“Abstract words are ancient coins whose concrete images in the give and take of talk have worn away with use.”
Source: The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind
“Abstract words such as glory, honor, courage, or hallow were obscene beside the concrete names of villages, the numbers of roads, the names of rivers, the numbers of regiments and the dates.”
Source: Hemingway on War
“Abstract work, if one wishes to do it well, must be allowed to destroy one's humanity; one raises a monument which is at the same time a tomb, in which, voluntarily, one slowly inters oneself.”
Source: Autobiography
“Abstract: Careful review of a vast array of relevant evidence clearly leads to the conclusion that some unidentified flying objects are intelligently controlled vehicles whose origin is outside our solar system. All the arguments against the extraterrestrial origin seem to be based upon false reasoning, misrepresentation of evidence, neglect of relevant information, ignorance of relevant technology, or pseudo sophisticated assumptions about alien appearance, motivation, or government secrecy...”
“Abstracted into signs, objects can be understood as a self-referential
system with no relationship to either the natural materials or colours, or
traditional societal structures. A substratum of meanings, objects become a
lowest common denominator to which the connotative meanings imposed by
advertising are attached.”
Source: Baudrillard for Architects
“Abstraction allows man to see with his mind what he cannot physically see with his eyes... Abstract art enables the artist to perceive beyond the tangible, to extract the infinite out of the finite. It is the emancipation of the mind. It is an explosion into unknown areas.”
“Abstraction allows man to see with his mind what he cannot see physically with his eyes....Abstract art enables the artist to perceive beyond the tangible, to extract the infinite out of the finite. It is the emancipation of the mind. It is an exploration into unknown areas.”
“Abstraction allows man to see with his mind what he cannot see physically with his eyes.”
Source: Նամակներ
“Abstraction and luxury are the guard dogs of the upper class.”
“Abstraction and realism work best together.”
“Abstraction and representation are supposed to be going down two very different paths, one sociological and the other aesthetic.”
“Abstraction automatically gives rise to optimized solutions within the universal set of all possible solutions, as has been shown in this book. It is these optimized solutions that make up and drive the non-abstract parts of the world, while the non-optimized solutions remain ‘hidden’ from the material world, inside the abstract world.
Starting from a basis of no postulation, we build our theory. As we go on piling up possibilities, we come to a similar basis for understanding the four non-contact forces of nature known till date. The difference in ranges of these forces is explained from this basis in this book. Zero postulation or abstraction as the basis of theory synthesis allows us to explore even imaginary and chaotic non-favoured solutions as possibilities. With no postulation as the fundamental basis, we are thus able to pile up postulated results or favoured results, but not the other way round. We keep describing such implications of abstraction in this book. We deal with the abstraction of observable parameters involved in a given system”
“Abstraction brings the world into more complex, variable relations; it can extract beauty, alternative topographies, ugliness, and intense actualities from seeming nothingness.”
“Abstraction can provide stumbling blocks for people of strange intelligence.”
“Abstraction didn't have to be limited to a kind of rectilinear geometry or even a simple curve geometry. It could have a geometry that had a narrative impact. In other words, you could tell a story with the shapes. It wouldn't be a literal story, but the shapes and the interaction of the shapes and colors would give you a narrative sense. You could have a sense of an abstract piece flowing along and being part of an action or activity. That sort of turned me on.”
“Abstraction generally involves implication, suggestion and mystery, rather than obvious description.”
“Abstraction has always been around, since the drawings in the caves. It exists in all cultures all over the world. I thought for a while that it was going to be the major movement. But people always drift back to realism. I guess there is a certain security in that.”
“Abstraction in photography is ridiculous, and is only an imitation of painting. We stopped imitating painters a hundred years ago, so to imitate them in this day and age is laughable.”
“Abstraction is a mental process we use when trying to discern what is essential or relevant to a problem; it does not require a belief in abstract entities.”
Source: Realizing Freedom: Libertarian Theory, History, and Practice
“Abstraction is an esoteric language.”
“Abstraction is an exercise in a pre-assured failure. It is a futile attempt to communicate the non-communicable”
“Abstraction is everybody's zero but nobody's nought.”
Source: Robert Smithson, the Collected Writings
“Abstraction is itself an abstract word and has no single meaning ... Every word in our language is abstract, because it represents something else.”
“Abstraction is one of the greatest visionary tools ever invented by human beings to imagine, decipher, and depict the world.”
“Abstraction is real, probably more real than nature.”
Source: The prints of Josef Albers: a catalogue raisonné, 1915-1976
“Abstraction is the enemy of meaning.”
“Abstraction is the way to the heart - it is not the heart itself.”
“Abstraction, like poetry, does not dictate a clear narrative but rather, quietly offers a fragment, a piece of a mysteriously familiar narrative. In my paintings, there has continued to be a paring down of recognizable natural forms, which now have given way to a personal abstract vocabulary of shapes, colors and forms. The prominent use of abstraction has allowed me to distill and better communicate my emotions and ideas about life, nature and our respective place within it”
“abstraction, n.
Love is one kind of abstraction. And then there are those nights when I sleep alone, when I curl into a pillow that isn't you, when I hear the tiptoe sounds that aren't yours. It's not as if I can conjure you up completely. I must embrace the idea of you instead.”
Source: The Lover's Dictionary
“Abstraction returned as soon as artists tried to come to closer grips with reality than naturalistic representation permitted.”
Source: The Eternal Present: The beginnings of art
“Abstractionism exacerbated the problem but sustainability, if intelligently conceived, could heal the rift between garden, landscape and urban design. Absolute sustainability is not possible. But relative sustainability is a practical and desirable proposition.”
Source: British Gardens: History, philosophy and design
“Abstractions about right and wrong, whether they are as old as Thou Shalt Not Kill or as modern as Do Your Own Thing, often serve only to confuse and weaken genuine moral decision.”
Source: Dancing at the Edge of the World: Thoughts on Words, Women, Places
“Abstractions are themselves the creatures of the mind; and if the mind itself were an abstraction, we should have no abstractions at all.”
Source: Caliban in Grub Street 1930 [Leather Bound]
“Abstractness, sometimes hurled as a reproach at mathematics, is its chief glory and its surest title to practical usefulness. It is also the source of such beauty as may spring from mathematics.”
“Abstracts are real and time is a lie, it cannot be measured when one moment can expand to hold everything.”
Source: Never Change
“Abstracts, mostly. Nonsense art, my friend Jake calls it. But it’s not really nonsense, it’s just—other people paint what they see. I paint what I feel. Maybe it’s confusing, swapping one sense for another, but there’s beauty in the transmutation.”
Source: The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue
“Abstracts, abridgments, summaries, etc., have the same use with burning-glasses,--to collect the diffused light rays of wit and learning in authors, and make them point with warmth and quickness upon the reader's imagination.”
“Abstruse and mystic thoughts you must express With painful care, but seeming easiness; For truth shines brightest thro' the plainest dress.”
“Abstruse questions must have abstruse answers.”
Source: Plutarch's Lives
“Absurd laughter is a kind of protest against an absurd existence.”
“Absurd, irreducible; nothing — not even a profound and secret delirium of nature — could explain it. Obviously I did not know everything, I had not seen the seeds sprout, or the tree grow. But faced with this great wrinkled paw, neither ignorance nor knowledge was important: the world of explanations and reasons is not the world of existence. A circle is not absurd, it is clearly explained by the rotation of a straight segment around one of its extremities. But neither does a circle exist. This root, on the other hand, existed in such a way that I could not explain it.”
“Absurd, irreducible; nothing--not even a profound and secret delirium of nature--could explain [a tree root].”
“Absurd- that is the light mind that establishes its own borders.”
“Absurdism, like methodical doubt, has wiped the slate clean. It leaves us in a blind alley. But, like methodical doubt, it can, by returning upon itself, open up a new field of investigation, and in the process of reasoning then pursues the same course. I proclaim that I believe in nothing and that everything is absurd, but I cannot doubt the validity of my proclamation and I must at least believe in my protest.”
Source: The Rebel: An Essay on Man in Revolt
“Absurdities are great or small in proportion to custom or insuetude.”
“Absurdities die of self-strangulation.”
“Absurdity and anti—absurdity are the two poles of creative energy.”
“Absurdity is one of the most human things about us: a manifestation of our most advanced and interesting characteristics.”
Source: Mortal Questions
“Absurdity is the best cure for adversity.”