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.
Arthur Schopenhauer



I paint; I draw and paint - I've been doing that since I was in third grade, drawing realistically and then changing to abstract art. That was my first creative thing before guitar or comedy.
Steven Wright


The things I talk about and explain couldn't happen - yet, they don't seem impossible - you could say I talk about the world in an abstract perspective. But then, the world is basically insane - and it's trying to pass itself off as being a sane place. I show it for what it is.
Steven Wright


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



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.
Salvador Dali


Evil is the product of the ability of humans to make abstract that which is concrete.
Jean-Paul Sartre



I say a murder is abstract. You pull the trigger and after that you do not understand anything that happens.
Jean-Paul Sartre


The universe is governed by science. But science tells us that we can't solve the equations, directly in the abstract.
Stephen Hawking


To those who have exhausted politics, nothing remains but abstract thought.
Honore de Balzac


There is no such thing as justice in the abstract; it is merely a compact between men.
Epicurus


Abstract art: a product of the untalented sold by the unprincipled to the utterly bewildered.
Al Capp



Praise or blame has but a momentary effect on the man whose love of beauty in the abstract makes him a severe critic on his own works.
John Keats



How many people make themselves abstract to appear profound. The most useful part of abstract terms are the shadows they create to hide a vacuum.
Joseph Joubert


Wisdom is the abstract of the past, but beauty is the promise of the future.
Oliver Wendell Holmes


The Vietnam War required us to emphasize the national interest rather than abstract principles. What President Nixon and I tried to do was unnatural. And that is why we didn't make it.
Henry A. Kissinger


All abstract sciences are nothing but the study of relations between signs.
Denis Diderot


None of the abstract concepts comes closer to fulfilled utopia than that of eternal peace.
Theodor Adorno



In the abstract conception of universal wrong, all concrete responsibility vanishes.
Theodor Adorno



Verse is not written, it is bled; Out of the poet's abstract head. Words drip the poem on the page; Out of his grief, delight and rage.
Paul Engle


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.
Saul Alinsky



I get satisfaction out of seeing stuff that makes real change in the real world. We need a lot more of that and a lot less abstract stuff.
Temple Grandin


I am searching for abstract ways of expressing reality, abstract forms that will enlighten my own mystery.
Eric Cantona


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


Yes, I did, I mean I painted er, in a kind of abstract expressionist way, because of course that was exciting.
David Hockney



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


Science fiction is a way that I can go into the abstract, go into the imagination, and audiences are still willing to go along for the ride.
Nicolas Cage


Good science fiction is intelligent. It asks big questions that are on people's minds. It's not impossible. It has some sort of root in the abstract.
Nicolas Cage


Think of an abstract painting as very, very low relief - a thing, not a picture.
Jerry Saltz


It is easier to take a position in the abstract than when it hits home.
Dennis Prage