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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. -- Arshile Gorky
Abstraction is an esoteric language. -- Eric Fischl
Abstraction is the enemy of meaning. -- Marshall Ganz
Abstraction and realism work best together. -- Ken Danby
Abstraction is everybody's zero but nobody's nought. -- Robert Smithson
Abstraction is real, probably more real than nature. -- Josef Albers
Abstraction can provide stumbling blocks for people of strange intelligence. -- Gustave Flaubert
Abstraction generally involves implication, suggestion and mystery, rather than obvious description. -- Robert Genn
Abstraction and luxury are the guard dogs of the upper class. -- Jeff Koons
Abstraction is the way to the heart - it is not the heart itself. -- John Piper
Abstraction means getting away from a visual interpretation but nearer to an emotional one. -- Henry Moore
Abstraction allows man to see with his mind what he cannot see physically with his eyes. -- Arshile Gorky
Abstraction is an exercise in a pre-assured failure. It is a futile attempt to communicate the non-communicable -- Derek R. Audette
Abstraction returned as soon as artists tried to come to closer grips with reality than naturalistic representation permitted... -- Sigfried Giedion
Abstraction and representation are supposed to be going down two very different paths, one sociological and the other aesthetic. -- Kerry James Marshall
Abstraction is one of the greatest visionary tools ever invented by human beings to imagine, decipher, and depict the world. -- Jerry Saltz
Abstraction brings the world into more complex, variable relations; it can extract beauty, alternative topographies, ugliness, and intense actualities from seeming nothingness. -- Jerry Saltz
Abstraction is itself an abstract word and has no single meaning ... Every word in our language is abstract, because it represents something else. -- Eric Maisel
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. -- Tom G. Palmer
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. -- Berenice Abbott
Beauty surrounds us, but usually we need to be walking in a garden to know it. RUMI, attributed, Conquest of Abundance: A Tale of Abstraction Versus the Richness of Being Don't grieve. Anything you lose comes round in another form. -- Rumi
Washington isn't a city, it's an abstraction. -- Dylan Thomas
I'm really interested in the nondefinitive element of abstraction. -- Julie Mehretu
Even at its most perceptive, sociology deals in abstractions. -- Richard Russo
Enjoying art is a personal matter. It's made up by contemplation, silence, abstraction. -- Renzo Piano
Reflective abstraction, however, is based not on individual actions but on coordinated actions. -- Jean Piaget
Pure drawing is an abstraction. Drawing and colour are not distinct, everything in nature is coloured. -- Paul Cezanne
So the universe is constantly moving in the direction of higher evolutionary impulses, creativity, abstraction, and meaning. -- Deepak Chopra
The only real life is the collective life of the race; individual life has no existence except as an abstraction. -- Auguste Comte
Early-twentieth-century abstraction is art's version of Einstein's Theory of Relativity. It's the idea that changed everything everywhere: quickly, decisively, for good. -- Jerry Saltz
The job of the color photographer is to provide some level of abstraction that can take the image out of the daily. -- Joel Sternfeld
The dynamic element in my philosophy, taken as a whole, can be seen as an obstinate and untiring battle against the spirit of abstraction. -- Gabriel Marcel
Dancing is the loftiest, the most moving, the most beautiful of the arts, because it is no mere translation or abstraction from life; it is life itself. -- Havelock Ellis
Of the many forms of false culture, a premature converse with abstractions is perhaps the most likely to prove fatal to the growth of a masculine vigour of intellect. -- George Boole
We are so much the victims of abstraction that with the Earth in flames we can barely rouse ourselves to wander across the room and look at the thermostat. -- Terence McKenna
The first type of abstraction from objects I shall refer to as simple abstraction, but the second type I shall call reflective abstraction, using this term in a double sense. -- Jean Piaget
On the one hand, there are individual actions such as throwing, pushing, touching, rubbing. It is these individual actions that give rise most of the time to abstraction from objects. -- Jean Piaget
An administrator in a bureaucratic world is a man who can feel big by merging his non-entity in an abstraction. A real person in touch with real things inspires terror in him. -- Marshall McLuhan
I work in colour sometimes, but I guess the images I most connect to, historically speaking, are in black and white. I see more in black and white - I like the abstraction of it. -- Mary Ellen Mark
From the smallest necessity to the highest religious abstraction, from the wheel to the skyscraper, everything we are and everything we have comes from one attribute of man - the function of his reasoning mind. -- Ayn Rand
Why must art be static? You look at an abstraction, sculptured or painted, an entirely exciting arrangement of planes, spheres, nuclei, entirely without meaning. It would be perfect, but it is always still. The next step in sculpture is motion. -- Alexander Calder
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
In the 'Nude Descending a Staircase,' I wanted to create a static image of movement: movement is an abstraction, a deduction articulated within the painting, without our knowing if a real person is or isn't descending an equally real staircase. -- Marcel Duchamp
Nothing, indeed, is more dangerous to the young artist than any conception of ideal beauty: he is constantly led by it either into weak prettiness or lifeless abstraction: whereas to touch the ideal at all, you must not strip it of vitality. -- Oscar Wilde
The Geometer has the special privilege to carry out, by abstraction, all constructions by means of the intellect. Who, then, would wish to prevent me from freely considering figures hanging on a balance imagined to be at an infinite distance beyond the confines of the world? -- Evangelista Torricelli
Pure drawing is an abstraction. -- Paul Cezanne
I like residing in abstraction. -- Sufjan Stevens
Poetry is an abstraction bloodied. -- Wallace Stevens
Art, indeed, began with abstraction. -- Sigfried Giedion
Light is snow sifted / To an abstraction. -- May Sarton
All art is an abstraction to some degree. -- Henry Moore
A study, by its very nature, is an abstraction. -- Jane Velez-Mitchell
The state, the state apparatus, is not an abstraction. -- Samora Machel
The story of evolution unfolds with increasing levels of abstraction. -- Ray Kurzweil
Do not copy nature too much. Art is an abstraction. -- Paul Gauguin
An ounce of application is worth a ton of abstraction. -- Booker T. Washington
Philosophy does not exist. It is nothing but an hypostatized abstraction. -- R. D. Laing
An abstraction will move a mountain: Nothing can withstand an idea. -- Isabel Paterson
All art is abstract, because art is an abstraction of the truth. -- Milford Zornes
Almost without exception, blue refers to the domain of abstraction and immateriality. -- Wassily Kandinsky
I think, with abstraction, it's easy to fall into a sort of pastiche. -- Joe Bradley
Seek art and abstraction in nature by dreaming in the presence of it. -- Paul Gauguin
The truly modern artist is aware of abstraction in an emotion of beauty. -- Piet Mondrian
We have tried to fit man into abstraction, but he does not fit. -- Mark Tobey
Two elements are needed to form a truth - a fact and an abstraction -- Remy de Gourmont
Two elements are needed to form a truth - a fact and an abstraction. -- Remy de Gourmont
With greater completeness and abstraction, I have attained a form filtered to its essentials. -- Henri Matisse
Time is an absurdity. An abstraction. The only thing that matters is this moment. -- Jonathan Nolan
To arrive at abstraction, it is always necessary to begin with a concrete reality. -- Pablo Picasso
I'm an abstract painter not just for myself, but because I really believe in abstraction. -- Brice Marden
Only in relationship can you know yourself, not in abstraction, and certainly not in isolation. -- Jiddu Krishnamurti
Absolute honesty is as absurd an abstraction as an absolute temperature or an absolute value. -- George Bernard Shaw
Mankind? That is an abstraction. There have always been and always will be only individuals. -- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
By means of the sign, man frees himself from the here and now for abstraction. -- Umberto Eco
Music mirrors where we should go, have gone and can go. Music is an abstraction. -- Max Roach
If I choose abstraction over reality, it is because I consider it the lesser chaos. -- Robert Breault
I expect of abstraction as much as what imagery does for me... to carry meaning. -- Kay WalkingStick
Home is where the heart is, we say, rubbing the flint of one abstraction against another. -- Diane Ackerman
Nothing so tires a person as having to struggle, not with himself, but with an abstraction. -- Jose Saramago
Time is an abstraction which, on earth, exists only for the human brain it has evolved. -- Charles Lindbergh
Time isn't made of anything. It is an abstraction. Just a meaning that we impose upon motion. -- Anne Carson
Freedom which has genuine meaning is more than a timeless abstraction, more than an absence of restraints. -- Helen Lynd
The career of a young theoretical physicist consists of treating the harmonic oscillator in ever-increasing levels of abstraction. -- Sidney Coleman
Everything in dancing is style, allusion, the essence of many thoughts and feelings. The abstraction of many moments. -- Alvin Ailey
The Geometer has the special privilege to carry out, by abstraction, all constructions by means of the intellect. -- Evangelista Torricelli
In principle, any abstraction of the object is allowed which has a sufficiently strong creative power behind it. -- Max Beckmann
I've always wondered, like, what is so masculine about abstraction? How did men get the ownership over this? -- Cecily Brown
When truth is nothing but truth, it's unnatural, it's an abstraction that resembles nothing in the real world. -- Aldous Huxley
No religion can be considered in abstraction from its followers, or even from its various types of followers. -- Alfred North Whitehead
In my experience, you either have encapsulation and abstraction or you have neither. There is no middle ground. -- Steve McConnell
I felt like my parents were always involved with abstraction, and I wanted to do something very specific. -- Lena Dunham
I still believe in abstraction, but now I know that one ends with abstraction, not starts with it -- Alexander Stepanov
It is terrible to destroy a person's picture of himself in the interests of truth or some other abstraction. -- Doris Lessing
She really was pretty, for a grown-up, but when you are seven, beauty is an abstraction, not an imperative. -- Neil Gaiman
Every work of art is an abstraction from time; it denies the reality of change and decay and death. -- Lewis Mumford
The desert is no longer a landscape, it is a pure form produced by the abstraction of all others. -- Jean Baudrillard
Become aware of internal, subjective, sub-verbal experiences, so that these experiences can be brought into the world of abstraction... -- Abraham Maslow
The appearance is the allusion of abstraction when in fact I am in control of every aspect of that symmetry. -- Kerry James Marshall
A perfume is more than an extract it is a presence in abstraction. A perfume, for me, is a mystique. -- Giorgio Armani
It is not that uncommon for the cost of an abstraction to outweigh the benefit it delivers. Kill one today! -- John Carmack
I wouldn't say I'm a very technical [guitar] player. I'm more intuitive - it's always more about chasing an abstraction. -- Annie E. Clark
People who are too fastidious towards the finite never reach actuality, but linger in abstraction, and their light dies away. -- Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
Arabs are a complete abstraction in the propaganda world and all the death and destruction is completely unreal to Americans. -- Aleksandar Hemon
The philosopher Elaine Scarry has observed that "beauty always takes place in the particular." Cruelty, on the other hand, prefers abstraction. -- Jonathan Safran Foer
To make someone an icon is to make him an abstraction, and abstractions are incapable of vital communication with living people. -- David Foster Wallace
The Hindus have cultivated the power of analysis and abstraction. No nation has yet produced a grammar like that of Panini. -- Swami Vivekananda
There is an amount of abstraction in my movies, and sometimes they don't really understand it until the film is finished. -- Michel Gondry
Every man has to learn the points of the compass again as often as he awakes, whether from sleep or any abstraction. -- Henry David Thoreau
The pendulum of mathematics swings back and forth towards abstraction and away from it with a timing that remains to be estimated. -- Gian-Carlo Rota
The imagination is the liberty of the mind It is intrpeid and eager and the extreme of its achievement lies in abstraction. -- Wallace Stevens
Someone who is incapable of drawing, and cannot master line or colour perspective can always express themselves in some form of abstraction. -- Hans Werner Henze
The effective exploitation of his powers of abstraction must be regarded as one of the most vital activities of a competent programmer. -- Edsger Dijkstra
I do believe abstraction is and was meant to embody deep emotion. I believe that's its job, in the history of art. -- Sean Scully
Beauty comes from the balance between two and three dimensions, between abstraction and representation - I seek the equilibrium behind changing appearances. -- Henri Matisse
If I see a human body on the stage, I don't see it as an abstraction. I see it as a body. -- Antony Tudor
Computer Science is a science of abstraction -creating the right model for a problem and devising the appropriate mechanizable techniques to solve it. -- Alfred Aho
What I hope is I'll eventually be seen as an actual individual, not as some abstraction - an art dealer running a museum." -- Jeffrey Deitch
Whether a photo or music, or a drawing or anything else I might do?it's ultimately all an abstraction of my peculiar experience. -- William Eggleston
Pay attention to minute particulars. Take care of the little ones. Generalization and abstraction are the plea of the hypocrite, scoundrel, and knave. -- William Blake
An audience is an abstraction; it has no taste. It must depend on the only person who has (pardon, should have), the conductor. -- Igor Stravinsky

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