Abstract Quotes

There is no abstract art. You must always start with something. Afterward you can remove all traces of reality. (Pablo Picasso)
Money is human happiness in the abstract; he, then, who is no longer capable of enjoying human happiness in the concrete devotes himself utterly to money. View quote
Arthur Schopenhauer
I try to make concrete that which is abstract. View quote
Juan Gris
I'm not a natural leader. I'm too intellectual; I'm too abstract; I think too much. View quote
Newt Gingrich
It makes no difference whether a work is naturalistic or abstract; every visual expression follows the same fundamental laws. View quote
Hans Hofmann
Change means movement. Movement means friction. Only in the frictionless vacuum of a nonexistent abstract world can movement or change occur without that abrasive friction of conflict. View quote
Saul Alinsky
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. View quote
Kenneth Clark
All abstract sciences are nothing but the study of relations between signs. View quote
Denis Diderot
Delight at having understood a very abstract and obscure system leads most people to believe in the truth of what it demonstrates. View quote
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
Passion isn't something that lives way up in the sky, in abstract dreams and hopes. It lives at ground level, in the specific details of what you're doing every day. View quote
Marcus Buckingham
Mankind is divided into rich and poor, into property owners and exploited; and to abstract oneself from this fundamental division; and from the antagonism between poor and rich means abstracting oneself from fundamental facts. (Joseph Stalin)
I say a murder is abstract. You pull the trigger and after that you do not understand anything that happens. View quote
Jean-Paul Sartre
When I examine myself and my methods of thought, I come to the conclusion that the gift of fantasy has meant more to me than any talent for abstract, positive knowledge. View quote
Albert Einstein
To those who have exhausted politics, nothing remains but abstract thought. View quote
Honoré de Balzac
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. View quote
Roy Lichtenstein
Abstract liberty, like other mere abstractions, is not to be found. View quote
Edmund Burke
By phonemic trans-formation into visual terms, the alphabet became a universal, abstract, static container of meaningless sounds. View quote
Marshall McLuhan
I am dominated by one thing, an irresistible, burning attraction towards the abstract. View quote
Gustave Moreau
Human beings are incontestably capital from an abstract and mathematical point of view. View quote
Theodore Schultz
We are all hungry and thirsty for concrete images. Abstract art will have been good for one thing: to restore its exact virginity to figurative art. View quote
Salvador Dalí
At the classical origins of philosophic thought, the transcending concepts remained committed to the prevailing separation between intellectual and manual labor to the established society of enslavement. ... Those who bore the brunt of the untrue reality and who, therefore, seemed to be most in need of attaining its subversion were not the concern of philosophy. It abstracted from them and continued to abstract from them. (Herbert Marcuse)
The process by which civilization, as an abstract entity distinct from the societies in which it is embodied, dies or is reborn is a very significant one. View quote
Carroll Quigley
The longer mathematics lives the more abstract - and therefore, possibly also the more practical - it becomes. View quote
Eric Temple Bell
Abstract art: a product of the untalented sold by the unprincipled to the utterly bewildered. View quote
Al Capp
Mark Tobey fills his canvases with elliptical, calligraphic lines, beautiful whirls that seem at first glance to be completely abstract and to come from nowhere at all except his own subjective musing. But I shall never forget how struck I was, on visiting Tobey's studio one day, to see strewn around books on astronomy and photographs of the Milky Way. I knew then that Tobey experiences the movement of the stars and solar constellations as the external pole of his encounter. View quote
Rollo May