Top 1200 Abstract Quotes & Sayings - Page 20

If sustainability is going to take hold in the corporate sector in a big way - and we need it to - it will be when it produces big profits and faster growth. It won't happen because of an optional executive commitment to an abstract concept. It will happen because sustainability is a great business strategy. And it is

I don't think that my art isn't serious. I think the subjects are not serious, or my treatments of the subjects are not serious. But then, I'm also putting down subject, because like the abstract expressionists, I don't think the subject is important.

The artists catch what's in the air. It's not because the artist "felt like it" or is a guru who channels the truth of the universe in some opaque, abstract way, or even in a realistic painting. The comics artist is someone who has the humility to set himself up in public culture and to communicate with the reader. If your image doesn't make sense, it's your problem, and I shouldn't publish it.

The presentation of mathematics in schools should be psychological and not systematic. The teacher, so to speak, should be a diplomat. He must take account of the psychic processes in the boy in order to grip his interest, and he will succeed only if he presents things in a form intuitively comprehensible. A more abstract presentation is only possible in the upper classes.

Ideas are like fish. If you want to catch little fish, you can stay in the shallow water. But if you want to catch the big fish, you’ve got to go deeper. Down deep, the fish are more powerful and more pure.They’re huge and abstract. And they’re very beautiful.

The story of the growth of the World Wide Web can be measured by the number of Web pages that are published and the number of links between pages. The Web's ability to allow people to forge links is why we refer to it as an abstract information space, rather than simply a network.

My own terror of appearing sentimental is so strong that I’ve decided to fight against it, some; but the terror is still there. . . . Do you identify with a distaste/fear about sentimentality? Do you agree that, past a certain line, such distaste can turn everything arch and sneering and too ironic? Or do you have your own set of abstract questions to drive yourself nuts with?

Most professional women I know - myself included - long since gave up looking for a rulebook or a roadmap; we make it up as we go along. Every day presents a new choice, a new challenge, which makes long-term career planning seem like an especially abstract exercise.

Sometimes it happens that the computer's assessment is very abstract. It's correct, but it's not useful for a practical game. You have to prove the assessment with very strong moves and if you don't find all of these strong moves you may lose very quickly. For a computer this is not a problem, but for humans it is not so easy.

A teacher who cannot explain any abstract subject to a child does not himself thoroughly understand his subject; if he does not attempt to break down his knowledge to fit the child's mind, he does not understand teaching.

As a general habit and general tendency, I prefer not to bog a piece down with a great number of transitory, contemporary references, because in the end, I'm concerned, not in an abstract way, but an actual way, with creating a world which has a universality to it - even though what goes on is made up of texture and detail, contemporary detail.

There's that great Irish joke: a man is lost in the countryside, stops a passer-by: 'how do I get to Dublin?'. The passer-by says 'well, I wouldn't start from here'. Rather than starting by talking in the abstract about materialism, dualism, 'material stuff' and things like that in regard to the mind, I would rather start from somewhere else.

Learn Languages the Right Way. Language acquisition games and abstract communicative method are bullshit. The second-best way to learn a foreign language is alone in a room doing skull-numbing rote memorization of vocabulary, grammar, key phrases, and colloquialisms. The best way is in bed.

The Constitution does not protect the sovereignty of States for the benefit of the States or state governments as abstract political entities, or even for the benefit of the public officials governing the States. To the contrary, the Constitution divides authority between federal and state governments for the protection of individuals.

We may hope that machines will eventually compete with men in all purely intellectual fields. But which are the best ones to start with? Many people think that a very abstract activity, like the playing of chess, would be best. It can also be maintained that it is best to provide the machine with the best sense organs that money can buy, and then teach it to understand and speak English.

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.

The world is very complicated and it is clearly impossible for the human mind to understand it completely. Man has therefore devised an artifice which permits the complicated nature of the world to be blamed on something which is called accidental and thus permits him to abstract a domain in which simple laws can be found.

The bourgeoisie, which far surpasses the proletariat in the completeness and irreconcilibility of its class consciousness, is vitally interested in imposing its moral philosophy upon the exploited masses. It is exactly for this purpose that the concrete norms of the bourgeois catechism are concealed under moral abstractions...The appeal to abstract norms is not a disinterested philosophic mistake but a necessary element in the mechanics of class deception.

A hideous ecstasy of fear and vindictiveness, a desire to kill, to torture, to smash faces in with a sledge hammer, seemed to flow through the whole group of people like an electric current, turning one even against one's will into a grimacing, screaming lunatic. And yet the rage that one felt was an abstract, undirected emotion which could be switched from one object to another like the flame of a blowlamp.

There is something myopic and stunted in focussing only on the meaning of words and sentences. And this myopia is especially unfortunate when combined with a rather abstract view of a language as a set of elements and rules for combining these. For the result is to divorce enquiry into meaning from attention to the way words - and gestures, facial expressions, rituals and so on - are embedded in practices, in what Wittgenstein called 'the stream of life'.

With a live audience, it's very clear when you've pushed it too far to the edge - because you fall off that edge and hit bottom with a thud. Nothing abstract about that. You know you went too far when you hear that groan or worse - that silence instead of the big laugh you were expecting following your hilariously edgy joke.

Someone will write a resolution that says, 'I want to exercise more,' or 'I want to lose 15 pounds' - which is great, that's a great goal to have - but every study tells us that if you pose things in abstract, goal-related terms, it's much less likely that you will accomplish it than if you structure it as an actual activity.

Although objectively greater demands are placed on this authority, it operates less as a public opinion giving a rational foundation to the exercise of political and social authority, the more it is generated for the purpose of an abstract vote that amounts to no more than an act of acclamation within a public sphere temporarily manufactured for show or manipulation.

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.

The abstract, especially in those rough sketches, is very important to me, perhaps because of my advertising background, where layout is so important. Sometimes those first few lines cut the paper into such satisfying shapes that I don't want to go on, but I always do, adding nostrils and nipples and bootstraps until I have filled the paper up as usual.

Clearly, mythology is no toy for children. Nor is it a matter of archaic, merely scholarly concern, of no moment to modern men of action. For its symbols (whether in the tangible form of images or in the abstract form of ideas) touch and release the deepest centers of motivation, moving literate and illiterate alike, moving mobs, moving civilizations.

If language naturally evolves to serve the needs of tiny rodents with tiny rodent brains, then what's unique about language isn't the brilliant humans who invented it to communicate high-level abstract thoughts. What's unique about language is that the creatures who develop it are highly vulnerable to being eaten.

Is not art a tool we employ to peel the kitsch off life? Layer by layer art strips life bare. The more abstract it gets, the more transparent the air is. Can it be that the farther it is removed from life, the clearer art becomes?

I love lyrics. I've always been averse to the straight lyric idea. I guess a big part of it is, that songs that are literary always turn me off. Because they feel so abstract. Like a song. What is a song? We have to remember what the function of a concert and the function of playing a song for people are. It's all become really abstracted.

Realism and Naturalism rely mostly on the eye of the flesh. Abstract, conceptual and surrealistic art rely mostly on the eye of the mind. Great works of art rely on the eye of contemplation, the eye of the spirit.

Objective painting is not good painting unless it is good in the abstract sense. A hill or tree cannot make a good painting just because it is a hill or tree. It is lines and colors put together so that they may say something.

The physical five oranges goes up the ladder to the picture of the five oranges which goes up to the representation of the five oranges as a numeral. This points in the direction of a definition of abstraction: when we abstract we voluntarily ignore details of a context, so that we can accomplish a goal.

We all have our own takes on things. To being yourself. The abstract, the whole thing that I play with, seems to result in seeing through your lenses, and once you express how you see things to others, you start to see there are similarities between all people. It's kind of like, no matter how far you go, you're still where you started, in a way.

Let me see: art and activism. I can always fall back on, "the question should be, what isn't political? Everything you do is political, even if it's abstract. You're making a political statement even if it's unwittingly." I think so much of art is unconscious anyway, the artist doesn't know the real reason they're doing it. They're just kind of going along with it intuitively.

To really be on stage and not know what you're going to say, and to be able to say something that makes people laugh, or do something that's sort of abstract or off the beaten path and have people connect to it by just putting your ideas together, that really makes me happy.

My colleagues and I have gone in the footsteps of our predecessors since the very first day we were called by our people to care for their future. We went any place, we looked for any avenue, we made any effort to bring about negotiations between Israel and its neighbors, negotiations without which peace remains an abstract desire.

Intellectually, perspective [drawing] is a breakthrough, because here, for the first time, the physical space we live in is being depicted as ifit were an abstract, mathematical space. A less obvious innovation due to perspective is that here, for the first time, people are actually drawing pictures of infinities.

Electric and magnetic forces. May they live for ever, and never be forgot, if only to remind us that the science of electromagnetics, in spite of the abstract nature of its theory, involving quantities whose nature is entirely unknown at the present, is really and truly founded on the observations of real Newtonian forces, electric and magnetic respectively.

I can't actually explain why my lines got shorter, but they did. Just as I can't explain why my early poems were 'all image' and my current ones are relatively abstract. The sense of the line changed with the theme, somehow my ear (or brain or heart/mind) fell in love with a short line and very very simple words.

Do we, as humans, having an ability to reason and to communicate abstract ideas verbally and in writing, and to form ethical and moral judgments using the accumulated knowledge of the ages, have the right to take the lives of other sentient organisms, particularly when we are not forced to do so by hunger or dietary need, but rather do so for the somewhat frivolous reason that we like the taste of meat? In essence, should we know better?

It is the artist's responsibility to be the oracle, to abstract where you are - that is our responsibility - we're not there to look glamorous. We're there to tune into the frequency of the Earth and the connective tissues of those things that we are responding to - language, colour, costume, literature, poetry, cuisine, perfume - these are the things that make up the desire to throw paint on a canvas, these are the things that create the excitement for building a new language!

To say! To know how to say! To know how to exist via the written voice and the intellectual image! This is all that matters in life; the rest is men and women, imagined loves and factitious vanities, the wiles of our digestion and forgetfulness, people squirming — like worms when a rock is lifted — under the huge abstract boulder of the meaningless blue sky.

Beauty, like all other qualities presented to human experience, is relative; and the definition of it becomes unmeaning and useless in proportion to its abstractness. To define beauty not in the most abstract, but in the most concrete terms possible, not to find a universal formula for it, but the formula which expresses most adequately this or that special manifestation of it, is the aim of the true student of aesthetics.

I like working with sound; sound and rhythm. I like the abstract more than "What does that mean?" Nobody ever says to you, "Why did you use a harmonium?" Or "What is that ringing sound that occurs here?" The questions are always "What does that song mean?" or "What were you trying to say here?"

Good writing, and this is especially important in a subject such as economics, must also involve the reader in the matter at hand. It is not enough to explain. The images that are in the mind of the writer must be made to reappear in the mind of the reader, and it is the absence of this ability that causes much economic writing to be condemned, quite properly, as abstract.

It might be suggested, and not easily disproven that anything, no matter how exotic, can be believed by someone. On the other hand, abstract belief is largely impossible; it is the concrete, the actuality of the cup, the candle, the sacrificial stone, which hardens belief; the statue is nothing until it cries, the philosophy is nothing until the philosopher is martyred.

The fact that astrology nevertheless yields valid results proves that it is not the apparent positions of the stars which work, but rather the times which are measured or determined by arbitrarily named stellar positions. Time thus proves to be a stream of energy filled with qualities and not, as our philosophy would have it, an abstract concept or precondition of knowledge.

To be brutally honest, for much of that time, I was the only person in the world with Parkinson's. Of course, I mean that in the abstract. I had become acutely aware of people around me who appears to have the symptoms of Parkinson's disease, but as long as they didn't identify with me, I was in no rush to identify with them. My situation allowed, if not complete denial, at least a thick padding of insulation.

One thing that makes me very happy is to have a complicated idea and to feel that I've expressed myself clearly. I remember writing the ending to 'Happier at Home.' I wrote the entire book to build to that ending 'now is now,' and what I had to say was very abstract, and yet I felt satisfied that I managed to say what I wanted to say.

For Singapore, its test for its own democracy must be whether it fit and serve the interests of its people and conditions, and not serve some abstract ideal that the Western media thought it ought to conform to. If in 10 years, Philippines, Taiwan and Korea were better societies because they adopted the US model, Singapore would hurry to catch.

I always make a point to make my records different. Let's say I have a record that's influenced by hip-hop in an abstract way; for the next record, I'd try not to do that. They are all connected in a personal way but it's important not to repeat myself, because then I can always learn something about myself through my work.

Delacroix, Wagner, Baudelaire - all great theorists, bent on dominating other minds by sensuous means. Their one dream was to create the irresistible effect - to intoxicate, or overwhelm. They looked to analysis to provide them with the keyboard on which to play, with certainty, on man's emotions, and they sought in abstract meditation they key to sure and certain action upon their subject - man's nervous and psychic being.

Every art critic and every writer doesn't have a frame to start off from. If I made a statement saying, "This is Abstract Expressionism," they could go, "Well, he failed miserably," or, "Fantastic, this is a new genius!" But in art history, I don't see any of the artists I like spewing bullshit. I don't see anyone recording it or pronouncing what they were doing.

Our vanity, our passions, our spirit of imitation, our abstract intelligence, our habits have long been at work, and it is the task of art to undo this work of theirs, making us travel back in the direction from which we have come to the depths where what has really existed lies unknown within us.

Men agree that justice in the abstract is proportion, but they differ in that some think that if they are equal in any respect they are equal absolutely, others that if they are unequal in any respect they should be unequal in all. The only stable principle of government is equality according to proportion, and for every man to enjoy his own.

An immoderate fondness for dress, for pleasure, and for sway, are the passions of savages; the passions that occupy those uncivilized beings who have not yet extended the dominion of the mind, or even learned to think with the energy necessary to concatenate that abstract train of thought which produces principles.... that women from their education and the present state of civilized life, are in the same condition, cannotbe controverted.

I love monsters. If I go to a church, I'm more interested in the gargoyles than the saints. I really don't care much about the idea of normal - that's very abstract to me. I think that perfection is practically unattainable but imperfection is right at hand. So that's why I love monsters: because they represent a side of us we should actually embrace and celebrate.

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.'

In this science the illustrations and examples are not confined in their effect merely to the practice they afford in the analytical art, but [...] they also store the mind with independent geometrical and physical knowledge. Besides, it should be considered, that the only effectual method of impressing abstract formulae and rules upon the memory, and, indeed, of making them fully and clearly apprehended by the understanding, is by examples of their practical application.

No one else writes like Gord Downie, so it's difficult to compare him. He can work in the abstract and still somehow be really specific. He lets parts of his consciousness in that most writers aren't able to do, myself included. I don't feel like I have that access to the surreal and the somehow beautifully meaningful non-sequitur - that fits perfectly. I can never figure that out, how he does that.