Abstract Quotes

No cause, no God, no abstract idea can justify the mass slaughter of innocents.

Abstract painting is abstract. It confronts you. There was a reviewer a while back who wrote that my pictures didn't have any beginning or any end. He didn't mean it as a compliment, but it was.

Of all the arts, abstract painting is the most difficult. It demands that you know how to draw well, that you have a heightened sensitivity for composition and for colors, and that you be a true poet. This last is essential.

A perfume is more than an extract it is a presence in abstraction. A perfume, for me, is a mystique.

Exclusively of the abstract sciences, the largest and worthiest portion of our knowledge consists of aphorisms: and the greatest and best of men is but an aphorism.

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

Everything abstract is ultimately part of the concrete. Everything inanimate finally serves the living. That is why every activity dealing in abstraction stands in ultimate service to a living whole.

Abstract painting is abstract. It confronts you.

Nothing is more abstract than reality.

I was worried in the '80s that the best abstract painting had become obsessed with materiality, and painterly gestures and materiality were up against the wall.

Prefer the familiar word to the far-fetched. Prefer the concrete word to the abstract. Prefer the single word to the circumlocution. Prefer the short word to the long. Prefer the Saxon word to the Romance.

I wore one of my Tanguy earrings and one made by Calder in order to show my impartiality between Surrealist and Abstract Art.

It is often my nature to be abstract, hidden in plain sight, or nowhere at all.

Abstract art has helped us to experience the emotional power inherent in pure form.

I am dominated by one thing, an irresistible, burning attraction towards the abstract.

Like Aristotle, conservatives generally accept the world as it is; they distrust the politics of abstract reason – that is, reason divorced from experience.

Do not be deluded by the abstract word Freedom. Whose freedom? Not the freedom of one individual in relation to another, but freedom of Capital to crush the worker.

Americans have no capacity for abstract thought, and make bad coffee.

Mankind? That is an abstraction. There have always been and always will be only individuals.

The Analytical Engine is an embodying of the science of operations, constructed with peculiar reference to abstract number as the subject of those operations.

Abstraction is real, probably more real than nature.

Pacifism, the preaching of peace in the abstract, is one of the means of duping the working class.

My art is not abstract, it lives and breathes

If things are too similar, the dialogue is not very interesting. If you put in contrast, big and small, abstract and representational, you set up the possibility of a discourse.

You make knowledge relevant to life and you make it important for children to learn things that will really relate to things going on in their lives, and not abstract.