166 Abstract Thinking Quotes

Following is our list of abstract thinking quotations and slogans full of insightful wisdom and perspective about different thinking.

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Famous Abstract Thinking Quotes

Abstraction is real, probably more real than nature. — Josef Albers

Life is filled with abstractions, and the only way to make heads or tails of it is going through intuition. — David Lynch

An idea is always a generalization, and generalization is a property of thinking. To generalize means to think. — G. W. F. Hegel

The purpose of abstraction is not to be vague, but to create a new semantic level in which one can be absolutely precise. — Edsger Dijkstra

Everything which distinguishes man from the animals depends upon this ability to volatilize perceptual metaphors in a schema, and thus to dissolve an image into a concept. — Friedrich Nietzsche

The purely abstract theorist runs the risk that, as with modern decor, the furniture of the mind will be sparse, bare, and uncomfortable. — Robert K. Merton

The mind is inherently embodied. Thought is mostly unconscious. Abstract concepts are largely metaphorical. — George Lakoff

The essential functions of the mind consist in understanding and in inventing, in other words, in building up structures by structuring reality. — Jean Piaget

Malevitch discovered abstraction as an experimental principle that can propel creative work to previously unheard levels of invention; this abstract work allowed much greater levels of creativity. — Zaha Hadid

The thought: A logical inquiry — Gottlob Frege

Logic: The art of thinking and reasoning in strict accordance with the limitations and incapacities of the human misunderstanding. — Ambrose Bierce

The human imagination... has great difficulty in living strictly within the confines of a materialist practice or philosophy. It dreams, like a dog in its basket, of hares in the open. — John Berger

In retrospect I can see that my desire to create abstractions has become more and more radical. Art should not be delivering a report on reality, but should be looking at what's behind something. — Andreas Gursky

The highest form of pure thought is in mathematics. — Plato

Creative thinking will improve as we relate the new fact to the old and all facts to each other. — John Dewey

Short Abstract Thinking Quotes

  • Being able to ‘think out of the box’ presupposes you were able to think in it. — Bob Lutz
  • To think is to practice brain chemistry. — Deepak Chopra
  • Thought that accepts reality as given is no thought at all. — Herbert Marcuse
  • Thinking: the talking of the soul with itself. — Plato
  • The ability to perceive or think differently is more important than the knowledge gained. — David Bohm
  • The more abstract the truth you wish to teach, the more must you allure the senses to it. — Friedrich Nietzsche

Abstract Thinking Image Quotes

Abstract thinking quote Thinking is difficult, that's why most people judge.
Thinking is difficult, that's why most people judge.

Abstract Thoughts Quotes

Left-nostril breathing shifts blood flow to the opposite side of the prefrontal cortex, the right area that plays a role in creative thought, emotions, formation of mental abstractions, and negative emotions. — James Nestor

In the abstract, life is a mixture of chance and choice. Chance can be thought of as the cards you are dealt in life. Choice is how you play them. I chose to investigate blackjack. As a result, chance offered me a new set of unexpected opportunities. — Edward O. Thorp

In the abstract, life is a mixture of chance and choice. Chance can be thought of as the cards you are dealt in life. Choice is how you play them. — Edward O. Thorp

Abstract thinking quote The real difficulty is to overcome how you think about yourself.
The real difficulty is to overcome how you think about yourself.

Maybe I was a little jealous or envious of the abstract painters - but the truth was I thought what they were doing was boring. — Larry Rivers

One's mind and the earth are in a constant state of erosion, mental rivers wear away abstract banks, brain waves undermine cliffs of thought, ideas decompose into stones of unknowing, and conceptual crystallizations break apart into deposits of gritty reason. — Robert Smithson

Reality is infinitely diverse, compared with even the subtlest conclusions of abstract thought, and does not allow of clear-cut and sweeping distinctions. Reality resists classification. — Fyodor Dostoevsky

Abstract thinking quote When thinking about life, remember this: no amount of guilt can change the past, and no amount of an
When thinking about life, remember this: no amount of guilt can change the past, and no amount of anxiety can change the future.

You've got a lot of time for abstract thought when you've got your hand stuck up a dead badger. — Terry Pratchett

Critical (i.e., separating) methods apply only to the world-as-nature. It would be easier to break up a theme of Beethoven with dissecting knife or acid than to break up the soul by methods of abstract thought . Nature-knowledge and man-knowledge have neither ways nor aims in common. — Oswald Spengler

Everything in dancing is style, allusion, the essence of many thoughts and feelings. The abstraction of many moments. — Alvin Ailey

The Chess pieces are the block alphabet which shapes thoughts; and these thoughts, although making a visual design on the chessboard, express their beauty abstractly, like a poem — Marcel Duchamp

Different Thinking Quotes

If you think you are too small to make a difference, try sleeping with a mosquito. — Dalai Lama

Have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary. — Steve Jobs

Optimists and pessimists die the exact same death, but they live very different lives! — Shimon Peres

Abstract thinking quote Thinking is difficult, that's why most people judge.
Thinking is difficult, that's why most people judge.

If everyone is thinking alike, then no one is thinking. — Benjamin Franklin

My message to women: Do what makes you feel good, because there'll always be someone who thinks you should do it differently. Whether your choices are hits or misses, at least they're your own. — Michelle Obama

The greatest evil of American slavery was not involuntary servitude but rather the narrative of racial differences we created to legitimate slavery. Because we never dealt with that evil, I don't think slavery ended in 1865, it just evolved. — Bryan Stevenson

Abstract thinking quote If you have a bad thought about yourself, tell it to go to hell because that is exactly where it cam
If you have a bad thought about yourself, tell it to go to hell because that is exactly where it came from.

We can speak and think only of what exists. And what exists is uncreated and imperishable for it is whole and unchanging and complete. It was not or nor shall be different since it is now, all at once, one and continuous. — Parmenides

If we continue to think and live as if we belong only to different cultures and different religions, with separate missions and goals, we will always be in self-defeating competition with each other. Once we realize we are all members of humanity, we will want to compete in the spirit of love. — Muhammad Ali

In anything I do I try to stay true to myself because I think that's what matters most, and then the challenge is getting all these different sides of my personality to fit together in one box. It isn't an easy task. But that's basically what the end result represents. — G-Eazy

The surest way to corrupt a youth is to instruct him to hold in higher esteem those who think alike than those who think differently. — Friedrich Nietzsche

What Was I Thinking Quotes

I think it is just terrible and disgusting how everyone has treated Lance Armstrong, especially after what he achieved winning seven Tour de France races while on drugs......When I was on drugs I couldn't even find my bike. — Willie Nelson

I look back on my life with great joy. I think it was a very successful life. I always did what I wanted and never cared what anyone thought. Women's lib? I was a liberated woman long before there was a name for it. — Peggy Guggenheim

If there was one decision I would overrule, it would be 'Citizens United.' I think the notion that we have all the democracy that money can buy strays so far from what our democracy is supposed to be. — Ruth Bader Ginsburg

Abstract thinking quote Just do what works for you, because there will always be someone who thinks differently.
Just do what works for you, because there will always be someone who thinks differently.

I had no idea what I was walking into, and the years and years of hard work it would take. I felt like an outsider and like it was never going to happen. But even if I would have known, I think I still would have done it. Dancers are perfectionists, and that's what keeps us going and growing. — Misty Copeland

I wasn't very good about juggling family and my career. I was interested in who was coming to the children's birthday party, what my son was writing. I was thinking about Legos. — Jill Clayburgh

I tend to think having that extreme of color, that kind of black, is amazingly beautiful...and powerful. What I was thinking to do with my image was to reclaim the image of blackness as an emblem of power. — Kerry James Marshall

Abstract thinking quote Tension is who you think you should be. Relaxation is who yu are.
Tension is who you think you should be. Relaxation is who yu are.

I don't think there are too many rock bands in history that can look at the beginning and middle and ending of themselves and see what I see when I think of Soundgarden. I think from the beginning through the middle and the end it was such a perfect ride and such a perfect legacy to leave. — Chris Cornell

I've always been an animal lover. I've grown up with dogs my whole life. I think that is what helped me get the role on 'Lassie', I was comfortable around the dog, where many of the kids were afraid or intimidated by Lassie. — Will Estes

Mortals. I envy you. You think you can change things. Stop the universe. Undo what was done long before you came along. You are such beautiful creatures. — Kami Garcia

I was 18 years old, and it was a dream come true for me to work out and eat great food for free. What else do you want in life? People think that is what it is like to be in a SEAL team, but it is less than a fraction of your career as a real SEAL. — Jocko Willink

Conceptual Thinking Quotes

I tried to fit it in with some previous broad conceptual understanding of some part of mathematics that would clarify the particular problem I was thinking about. — Andrew Wiles

All ideologies are idiotic, whether religious or political, for it is conceptual thinking, the conceptual word, which has so unfortunately divided man. — Jiddu Krishnamurti

Metaphor is pervasive in everyday life, not just in language but in thought and action. Our ordinary conceptual system, in terms of which we both think and act, is fundamentally metaphorical in nature. — George Lakoff

Abstract thinking quote First think, second believe, third dream and finally dare.
First think, second believe, third dream and finally dare.

I do think it's important that we experiment with new vocabularies. That new words help us conceptualize our social existence in a different way. — Judith Butler

Words are a distraction to enlightenment. Getting rid of conceptual thinking means enlightenment. — Ramesh S Balsekar

General relativity is the cornerstone of cosmology and astrophysics. It has also provided the conceptual basis for string theory and other attempts to unify all the forces of nature in terms of geometrical structures. — Paul Davies

Abstract thinking quote I am not a saint, unless you think of a saint as a sinner who keeps on trying.
I am not a saint, unless you think of a saint as a sinner who keeps on trying.

I think the women - Lauryn Hill, Mary J. Blige, Erykah Badu - are doing new conceptual things and using their voices to create new American music. — Boz Scaggs

You must understand the whole of life, not just one little part of it. — Jiddu Krishnamurti

Thinking fragments reality - it cuts it up into conceptual bits and pieces. — Eckhart Tolle

The Buddha himself said, "I still use conceptual thinking, but I'm not formed by it." And that's the Buddha. — Tenzin Palmo

Abstraction Quotes

We feel the beauty of nature because we are part of nature and because we know that however much in our separate domains we abstract from the unity of Nature, this unity remains. Although we may deal with particulars, we return finally to the whole pattern woven out of these. — Ernest Everett Just

Painting is self-discovery. Every good artist paints what he is. - Jackson Pollock

Painting is self-discovery. Every good artist paints what he is. — Jackson Pollock

The drawings don't start with 'a beautiful mark'. It has to be a mark of something out there in the world. It doesn't have to be an accurate drawing, but it has to stand for an observation, not something that is abstract, like an emotion. — William Kentridge

Abstract thinking quote Every time you find some humor in a difficult situation, you win.
Every time you find some humor in a difficult situation, you win.

True Christianity is not merely believing a certain set of dry abstract propositions: it is to live in daily personal communication with an actual living person - Jesus Christ. — J. C. Ryle

There is no must in art because art is free. — Wassily Kandinsky

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. — Jackson Pollock

Abstract thinking quote Speak with honesty, think with sincerity, act with integrity.
Speak with honesty, think with sincerity, act with integrity.

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. — Wassily Kandinsky

There is no abstract art. You must always start with something. Afterward you can remove all traces of reality. — Pablo Picasso

Abstract is not a style. I simply want to make a surface work. This is just a use of space and form: it's an ambivalence of forms and space. — Joan Mitchell

I know the stars are my home. I learned about them, needed them for survival in terms of navigation. I know where I am when I look up at the sky. I know where I am when I look up at the Moon; it's not just some abstract romantic idea, it's something very real to me. See, I've expanded my home. — Gene Cernan

Logical Thinking Quotes

Live simply and without thinking too much, like a child with his father. Faith without too much thinking works wonders. The logical mind hinders the Grace of God and miracles. Practice patience without judging with the logical mind. — Elder Paisios of Mount Athos

In Architecture there is a part that is the result of Logical Reasoning and a part that is created through the Senses. There is always a point where they Clash. I don't think Architecture can be created without that Collision. — Tadao Ando

No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. - Niels Bohr

No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. — Niels Bohr

When it comes to thought, you should be in full control. Your brain’s job is to produce logic for you to consider. — Mo Gawdat

We are living in an interminable succession of absurdities imposed by the myopic logic of short-term thinking. — Jacques Yves Cousteau

You cannot approach people who think differently with reason and logic if they don't know what that means. First, you have to appeal to their values to start with. If you attack them, you lose them. — Jacque Fresco

Stop making sense. Logic is predictable. Think differently. - Paul Smith

Stop making sense. Logic is predictable. Think differently. — Paul Smith

Address to Albert Einstein: You are not thinking. You are merely being logical. - Niels Bohr

Address to Albert Einstein: You are not thinking. You are merely being logical. — Niels Bohr

Most of the mistakes in thinking are inadequacies of perception rather than mistakes of logic. — Edward De Bono

Pure logical thinking cannot yield us any knowledge of the empirical world. All knowledge of reality starts from experience and ends in it. — Albert Einstein

Rational Thinking Quotes

Wisdom lies in thinking. The spear-head of thinking is rationalism. — Periyar E. V. Ramasamy

Gratitude is the first sign of a thinking, rational creature. - Solanus Casey

Gratitude is the first sign of a thinking, rational creature. — Solanus Casey

All progress depends on the unreasonable man. — George Bernard Shaw

The intuitive mind is a sacred gift. — Albert Einstein

I never made one of my discoveries through the process of rational thinking — Albert Einstein

I think 'vegan' is a beautiful word. It is more than just a description for our diet. I see it as a visible template for an ethical, healthy, responsible, and rational life. Because it describes our character, it says we do not take the life of another living being to satisfy our wants. — Philip Wollen

Emotions are one of the main things that derail communication. Once people get upset at one another, rational thinking goes out of the window. — Chris Voss

Thinking rationally is often different from "positive thinking," in that it is a realistic assessment of the situation, with a view towards rectifying the problem if possible. — Albert Ellis

I think I got off on the wrong planet. Beam me up Scotty, there's no rational life here. — Robert Anton Wilson

If you attach your mind to any ideology, you're going to be on a road, and that road may or may not lead you in a good direction. But you're gonna stay on that road because you are attached to an ideology. It could be a terrible road, but you stick with it regardless of rational thinking. — Joe Rogan

Philosophical Thinking Quotes

No price is too high to pay for the privilege of owning yourself. — Friedrich Nietzsche

What you leave behind is not what is engraved in stone monuments, but what is woven into the lives of others. — Pericles

Love is the expression of the one who loves, not of the one who is loved. Those who think they can love only the people they prefer do not love at all. Love discovers truths about individuals that others cannot see — Soren Kierkegaard

Stop thinking about art works as objects, and start thinking about them as triggers for experiences. — Brian Eno

Philosophers should be, as Seneca put it, 'lawyers for humanity'. Make what you think and feel count; the examined life has global dimensions. — Martha C. Nussbaum

Humility is the most difficult of all virtues to achieve; nothing dies harder than the desire to think well of self. — T. S. Eliot

It’s only the philosophers and certain mathematicians who think that science is this inductive trend-seeking way of extrapolating from past observations into the future. — Naval Ravikant

And yet I adore him. I think he's quite crazy, and with no place or occupation in life, and far from happy, and philosophically irresponsible – and there is absolutely nobody like him. — Vladimir Nabokov

What other people think of me is none of my business. One of the highest places you can get to is being independent of the good opinions of other people. — Wayne Dyer

The past has no power over the present moment. — Eckhart Tolle

Strategic Thinking Quotes

If you're going to be thinking anyway, think big! — Donald Trump

Now North Korea certainly is located in a different place geographically, but I think it faces the same type of strategic decision. Does it want a different future for its people? — Mitchell Reiss

There's a path for everyone — as long as you have self-awareness and the willingness to think five moves ahead. — Patrick Bet-David

Strategic planning is not strategic thinking. Indeed, strategic planning often spoils strategic thinking, causing managers to confuse real vision with the manipulation of numbers. — Henry Mintzberg

They wanted war as part of their strategic grand plan to destroy any country such as Russia that resists American imperial expansion. They only pretend to think it was unprovoked. They are lying to us, manufacturing consent for war. — Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.

Don’t get wrapped around tactical competition. Think strategic all the time. — Jocko Willink

...there is no more strategic issue for a company, or any organization, than its ultimate purpose. For those who think business exists to make a profit, I suggest they think again. Business makes a profit to exist. Surely it must exist for some higher, nobler purpose than that. — Ray Anderson

Analysis Is the Critical Starting Point of Strategic Thinking — Kenichi Ohmae

Strategic management is not a box of tricks or a bundle of techniques. It is analytical thinking and commitment of resources to action. But quantification alone is not planning. Some of the most important issues in strategic management cannot be quantified at all. — Peter Drucker

Let's allow Poland and the Czech Republic to have that missile shield that they were entitled to by joining NATO. I think that's the right strategic response to Russian aggression. — Mike Pence

Rational Thought Quotes

You cannot expect any rational thought from a religious man. He is like a rocking log in water. — Periyar E. V. Ramasamy

Rationality of thought imposes a limit on a person's concept of his relation to the cosmos. — John Forbes Nash

So, let us, you and I, for the sake of our brother man, individually strive by example and influence to lift the standard of thought and conduct from the low level of selfishness and self-indulgence up to the lofty realms of aspirational thought and self-denial. — Ossian Everett Mills

I have often thought that if a rational Fascist dictatorship were to exist, then it would choose the American system. — Noam Chomsky

I suspect that most of the individuals who have religious faith are content with blind faith. They feel no obligation to understand what they believe. They may even wish not to have their beliefs disturbed by thought. — Mortimer Adler

More than ambition, more than ability, it is rules that limit contribution; rules are the lowest common denominator of human behavior. They are a substitute for rational thought. — Hyman Rickover

For me, each game is a new challenge, which has to be dealt with rationally and systematically. At that time, every other thought fades into oblivion. — Viswanathan Anand

It is not the world that is absurd, nor human thought: the absurd arises when the human need to understand meets the unreasonableness of the world, when 'my appetite for the absolute and for unity' meets 'the impossibility of reducing this world to a rational and reasonable principle.' — Albert Camus

To unfold the secret laws and relations of those high faculties of thought by which all beyond the merely perceptive knowledge of the world and of ourselves is attained or matured, is a object which does not stand in need of commendation to a rational mind. — George Boole

I believe that words uttered in passion contain a greater living truth than do those words which express thoughts rationally conceived. It is blood that moves the body. Words are not meant to stir the air only: they are capable of moving greater things. — Soseki Natsume

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More Abstract Thinking Quotes

I think more than writers, the major influences on me have been European movies, jazz, and Abstract Expressionism. — Don Delillo

Jesus was short on sermons, long on conversations; short on answers, long on questions; short on abstraction and propositions, long on stories and parables; short on telling you what to think, long on challenging you to think for yourself. — Brian D. McLaren

I think most people, when they think about the Black Panther Party, they think in very abstract, caricatured terms. They think about black fists in the air, but they don't think about the actual people, and the families, and the relationships. — Kerry Washington

The ideal trademark is one that is pushed to its utmost limits in terms of abstraction and ambiguity, yet is still readable. Trademarks are usually metaphors of one kind or another. And are, in a certain sense, thinking made visible. — Saul Bass

Art - when it is really doing what it should do - teaches abstract thinking; it teaches teamwork; it teaches people to actually think about things that they cannot see. — Bill T. Jones

When I was thinking about The Lion King, I said, we have to do what theater does best. What theater does best is to be abstract and not to do literal reality. — Julie Taymor

But men love abstract reasoning and neat systematization so much that they think nothing of distorting the truth, closing their eyes and ears to contrary evidence to preserve their logical constructions. — Fyodor Dostoevsky

It's not about facts, it's about feelings. It's about remembering feelings and happiness. A definition of art is that it makes concrete our most subtle emotions. I think the highest form of art is music. It's the most abstract of all art expression. — Agnes Martin

I'm not a natural leader. I'm too intellectual; I'm too abstract; I think too much. — Newt Gingrich

Everything will be all right - you know when? When people, just people, stop thinking of the United Nations as a weird Picasso abstraction and see it as a drawing they made themselves. — Dag Hammarskjold

But no one, when you stop to think, has ever equated abstract expressionism as a movement with jazz music. It's based on improvisation. The rhythms, the personal involvement, all of this is part of the jazz experience. — Romare Bearden

We often judge cities by great public buildings. But we admire great cities because people live there in a beautiful way. You have to think about how each person will live there; you can't just think about abstract ideas. — Daniel Libeskind

I began to realize that an intuitive understanding and consciousness was more significant than abstract thinking and intellectual logical analysis. Intuition is a very powerful thing, more powerful than intellect, in my opinion. That's had a big impact on my work. — Steve Jobs

When asked ... [about] an underlying quantum world, Bohr would answer, 'There is no quantum world. There is only an abstract quantum physical description. It is wrong to think that the task of physics is to find out how nature is. Physics concerns what we can say about Nature.' — Niels Bohr

I'd say that my profession ends where architectural thinking ends - architectural thinking in terms of thinking about programs and organizational structure. These abstractions play a role in many other disciplines, and those disciplines are now defining their 'architectures' as well. — Rem Koolhaas

Don't preach too much to your pupils or abound in good talk in the abstract. Lie in wait rather for the practical opportunities, be prompt to seize those as they pass, and thus at one operation get your pupils both to think, to feel, and to do. — William James

We think of Euclid as of fine ice; we admire Newton as we admire the peak of Teneriffe. Even the intensest labors, the most remote triumphs of the abstract intellect, seem to carry us into a region different from our own-to be in a terra incognita of pure reasoning, to cast a chill on human glory. — Walter Bagehot

It is only those who never think at all, or else who have accustomed themselves to blood invariably on abstract ideas, that ever feel ennui. — William Hazlitt

The abstraction, ostensibly, is simply for me the penetration of something that is more profound in many ways than rigidity of a form. A form if it breathes some, if it has some enigma to it, it is also the enigma that is the abstract, I would think. — Beauford Delaney

Abstract thinking leads to greater creativity... But in our businesses and our lives, we often do the opposite. We intensify our focus rather than widen our view. — Daniel H. Pink

Intuition is a very powerful thing, more powerful than intellect. — Steve Jobs

The unique eludes us; yet we remain faithful to the ideal of it; and in spite of sense and of our merely abstract thinking, it becomes for us the most real thing in the actual world, although for us it is the elusive goal of an infinite quest. — Josiah Royce

My interest in desperation lies only in that sometimes I find myself having become desperate. Very seldom do I start out that way. I can see of course that, in the abstract, thinking and all activity is rather desperate. — Willem de Kooning

I never use nature as a starting point. I never abstract from nature; I never consciously think of nature when I paint. — Adolph Gottlieb

Writing is the hammer & chisel that breaks down the established way of thinking. A concrete event, then an abstraction. An image, then a thought. Finally, writing builds another establishment with the fragments. — Diane Glancy

To say it another way, thinking, however abstract, originates in an embodied subjectivity, at once overdetermined and permeable to contingent events. — Teresa de Lauretis

Let me first say that I don't think the millennium target of cutting global poverty in half is an impossible or abstract target. I think it is a real and achievable goal. — Gro Harlem Brundtland

We think about the world in all ways we experience it ; we think visually, we think in sign, we think kinesthetically, we think in abstract term, we think in movement. Creativity is the process of having original ideas that have value. — Ken Robinson

Everyone who makes films has to be an athlete to a certain degree because cinema does not come from abstract academic thinking; it comes from your knees and thighs. — Werner Herzog

I think, with abstraction, it's easy to fall into a sort of pastiche. — Joe Bradley

Most great filmmakers are good at place. Like how people say, like, "The city itself is a character in the movie," you know? I'm so interior. I always forget there's such a thing as an exterior wide shot, where you can see where someone is. As opposed to just: how can we show what this person is thinking, in an abstract way that is felt? — Miranda July

The music is the imperative. It has the upper hand. I think all music, even though it's an abstraction, does motivate a particular meaning. Then it's the job of the musician to honor that meaning and to somehow implement lyrical material that can accommodate that emotional environment. — Sufjan Stevens

Sometimes I think I shouldn't explain much about my work because people will just feel what they feel when they see it. They'll love it or hate it or enjoy it on their own, like how I've looked at abstract paintings of other artists and cried or felt happy because I've felt, "Wow, I've lived that, I've understood that." — Jose Parla

Music, first of all, is completely about abstraction, which is exactly what architecture is not. In a way, it has been incredibly constructive to know what true abstraction is. So you dont fall into the trap of thinking that what you do is abstract. — Rafael Vinoly

I am fine, though it is hard to think of what kind of work to make at this point, other than decorative, escapist or abstract. I suppose I'll explore one or all of these things. — Cindy Sherman

My guard stood hard when abstract threats, too noble to neglect, deceived me into thinking, I had something to protect. — Bob Dylan

I'm a creature of adaptation. I take advantage of the second and the moment. My comedy breathes; it's not really that predictable. I do have a linear style, but other than that, there's a lot of abstract. I just go off on what I'm thinking. I'm not that topical. I like to talk about me and my experiences. — Tommy Davidson

It is so much easier to talk of poverty than to think of the poor, to argue the rights of capital than to see its results. Pretty soon we come to think of the theories and abstract ideas as things in themselves. — Walter Lippmann

How can you say one style is better than another? You ought to be able to be an Abstract Expressionist next week, or a Pop artist, or a realist, without feeling you've given up something.. I think that would be so great, to be able to change styles. And I think that's what's is going to happen, that's going to be the whole new scene. — Andy Warhol

(The festival) was awfully impersonal and abstract and there was something really gloomy about it. That's when I first started thinking about the typical view of reality. — Thomas Cahill

I consider my work non-objective and I think abstract is an abstraction of something, like a landscape. Abstraction means something is abstracted. It relates to something. Non-objective relates to nothing. It has no object. — Pat Steir

Although a lot of my work on the mind has been rather abstract and philosophical, I'm interested in psychology and neuroscience and I don't think there are any principled distinctions between the kind of knowledge we get from science and the knowledge we get from philosophy. — Tim Crane

I think previously, when fathers and sons argued with each other, they would still face each other and face each other's feelings, but now, the relationships between people has become much more abstracted. I think, actually, in China, the gulf that exists between the pre- and post-internet generations is more vast. — Jia Zhangke

True to her inveterate habit, rationalism reverts to 'principles,' and thinks that when an abstraction once is named, we own an oracular solution. — William James

No matter how much a young man likes to think for himself, he is always trying to model himself on some abstract pattern largely derived from the example of the world around him. And a man, no matter how conservative, shows his own worth by his personal deviation from that pattern. — Cesare Pavese

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