Abstract Quotes

“Mathematics expresses values that reflect the cosmos, including orderliness, balance, harmony, logic, and abstract beauty.”
― Deepak Chopra

“Music, uniquely among the arts, is both completely abstract and profoundly emotional. It has no power to represent anything particular or external, but it has a unique power to express inner states or feelings. Music can pierce the heart directly; it needs no mediation.”
― Oliver Sacks, Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain

“But it is a pipe."
"No, it's not," I said. It's a drawing of a pipe. Get it? All representations of a thing are inherently abstract. It's very clever.”
― John Green, The Fault in Our Stars

“I’m not very good at giving anyone a clear no.”
― Haruki Murakami, The Strange Library

“Basically, Sherri's idea had to do with bringing Fat's mind down from the cosmic and the abstract to the particular. She had hatched out the practical notion that nothing is more real than a large World War Two Soviet tank.”
― Philip K. Dick, VALIS

“Even time can be smelled and seen if you are observant, if you know how to smell the abstract. And if you do, you risk exposure to a certain addiction. The addiction to smell.”
― Misba, The High Auction

“I would like to say to those who think of my pictures as serene, whether in friendship or mere observation, that I have imprisoned the most utter violence in every inch of their surface.”
― Mark Rothko

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

“I know who I was, I can tell you who I may have been, but I am, now, only in this line of words I write.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin

“Not all doors open in the same direction and with the same effort!”
― Jasleen Kaur Gumber

“Names are cages. Naming something limits its definition and pigeon-holes its functions”
― তানজীম রহমান

“Do not be afraid of the word 'theory'. Yes, it can sound dauntingly abstract at times, and in the hands of some writers can appear to have precious little to do with the actual, visual world around us. Good theory however, is an awesome thing. [...] But unless we actually use it, it borders on the metaphysical and might as well not be used at all.”
― Richard Howells, Visual Culture

“I would put myself in the attitude to look in the eye an abstract truth, and I cannot. I blench and withdraw on this side and on that. I seem to know what he meant who said, No man can see God face to face and live.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Try thinking of a color that doesn't exist.”
― Kevin Molesworth, The Rudman Conjecture on Quantum Entanglement

“Only the very ugly is truly beautiful, and if the printed word has any meaning, then it must come from the very edge of fucky-bum-boo-boo”
― Chris Morris

“Visualization shapes art.
Visualization turns abstract dreams into a reality.”
― Michael Bassey Johnson, The Oneironaut’s Diary

“Carl saw Joselito in a big clean room full of light, with private bath and concrete balcony. And nothing to talk about there in the cold empty room, water hyacinths growing in a yellow bowl and the china blue sky and drifting clouds, fear flickering in and out of his eyes. When he smiled the fear flew away in little pieces of light, lurked enigmatically in the high cool corners of the room. And what could I say feeling death around me, and in the little broken images that came before sleep, there in the mind?”
― William S. Burroughs, Naked Lunch

“The most abstract truth is the most practical.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nature

“Sometimes, [gift] with depth is all.

Memory.”
― Monaristw

“Abstraction, like poetry, does not dictate a clear narrative but rather, quietly offers a fragment, a piece of a mysteriously familiar narrative. In my paintings, there has continued to be a paring down of recognizable natural forms, which now have given way to a personal abstract vocabulary of shapes, colors and forms. The prominent use of abstraction has allowed me to distill and better communicate my emotions and ideas about life, nature and our respective place within it”
― Nicholas Wilton

“It shook me as nothing had shaken me before. I had heard about earthquakes that engulfed thousands, about streams of burning lava that buried villages, about oceans that swallowed up islands. I had read of one million people drowned by the Yellow River, of two million drowned by the Yangtse. I knew that a million soldiers died at Verdun. But these were mere abstractions — numbers, statistics, information. One couldn't suffer for a million. But these three children I knew, I had seen with my own eyes — this was altogether different.”
― Fred Uhlman, Reunion

“How could I not be distracted? Here was a deity just like those I’d visited in museums as a child—a god of ancient myths, fantastic stories and long-lost rituals; a god from the distant past, from a society utterly unlike our own. Those were the terms on which I wanted to encounter him; not as a distant and abstract being, but as the product of a particular culture, at a particular time, made in the image of the people who lived then; a god shaped by their own physical circumstances, their own view of the world—and their own imaginations. Sitting in that lecture hall, it seemed to me that this potent figure had somehow been theorized away and replaced by the abstract being with whom we are more familiar today (…).”
― Francesca Stavrakopoulou, God: An Anatomy

“Bunyan points out, for example, how the Pharisees of Jesus’ day no doubt phrased their prayers well but were condemned because they fell short of “pouring out” their hearts to God (IWP, 38). Without help from the Holy Spirit in purifying and pouring out the heart, he writes, one who prays is “hyp- ocritical, cold, and unseemly” and “abominable to God” (IWP, 37).
The hypocrisy God detests, then, is importantly not a matter of say- ing one thing and doing another, but of saying one thing and feeling another: of a disjunction between the logocentric intellect and the heart, between the propositional truths of abstract doctrine and the emotions which are substantively to mirror and confirm it.”
― Lori Branch, Rituals of Spontaneity: Sentiment and Secularism from Free Prayer to Wordsworth

“In Delirio Familiari by Stewart Stafford

He devoured radioactive pizza,
eyes bulging to breaking point.
Every riddle imploded in a flash,
daymare fission without a joint.

He, the man of conjured letters;
she, his spark that moderates.
Janus creature, clockface duo,
oddballs, but fitting mates.

With dollops of ambrosial agony,
in frenzied closeness, but witty,
The Brain Surgeon’s Cookbook,
A bromide concoction served as ditty.

© Stewart Stafford, 2023. All rights reserved.”
― Stewart Stafford

“All I knew for certain was that somehow this God managed to see good in me when I could only see bad in myself. This God seemed determined not to give up on me, even when I felt like giving up on myself. To me, God had been little more than a fairytale. To me He was an abstract concept or set of ideas, not a living person who was all-powerful and real. And yet this fairytale was beginning to break out of its pages into the real world—into my life.”
― Michael J Heil, Pursued: God’s relentless pursuit and a drug addict’s journey to finding purpose

“Maybe patterns are children of methods !”
― mohammad amin mardani

“My beloved told / the sky to spell my name in / pocket watch curses / so lightning pitchforks collapse / on my status of being.”
― Keri Stewart, Frolicking on Blackberry Lane

“The syllogism he had learnt from Kiesewetter's Logic: "Caius is a man, men are mortal, therefore Caius is mortal," had always seemed to him correct as applied to Caius, but certainly not as applied to himself. That Caius—man in the abstract—was mortal, was perfectly correct, but he was not Caius, not an abstract man, but a creature quite, quite separate from all others. He had been little Vanya, with a mamma and a papa, with Mitya and Volodya, with the toys, a coachman and a nurse, afterwards with Katenka and will all the joys, griefs, and delights of childhood, boyhood, and youth. What did Caius know of the smell of that striped leather ball Vanya had been so fond of? Had Caius kissed his mother's hand like that, and did the silk of her dress rustle so for Caius? Had he rioted like that at school when the pastry was bad? Had Caius been in love like that? Could Caius preside at a session as he did? "Caius really was mortal, and it was right for him to die; but for me, little Vanya, Ivan Ilych, with all my thoughts and emotions, it's altogether a different matter. It cannot be that I ought to die. That would be too terrible.”
― Leo Tolstoy, The Death of Ivan Ilych

“What we mean, in the last resort, by 'an answer to prayer', is that from the beginning of time, before he set about the building of the worlds, God foreknew every prayer that human lips would breathe, and took it into account. That, and nothing less, is the staggering claim which we make every time we say the 'Our Father'.

If I could have collected all the symposiasts in a room, this is the issue I would have put to them, to 'try their spirits'. By all means (I would have said) let us leave dogma on one side, let us take no notice of all the secular disputes which divide the sympathies of Christian people, let us refrain as far as possible from prying into the mysterious secrets, too high for our ken. But- do you believe that God runs the world, and cares what happens in the world? For, if so, you will have to find something better than a pale, pantheist abstraction to satisfy your notion of God. And if not, you may spare your inkstands; nothing you can tell us about your religion will ever strengthen an infirm purpose or heal a broken heart.”
― Ronald Knox, Caliban in Grub Street 1930 [Leather Bound]

“Through my diseased eyes I'm sinful, sly, I can't stop stealing
I will pay the price of being a thief when I stop breathing”
― Bobby Gillespie