Famous Quotes & Sayings

Louise Bourgeois

I know that when I finish a drawing, my anxiety level decreases. The realistic drawings are a way of pinning down an idea. I don't want to loose it. With the abstract drawings, when I'm feeling loose, I can slip into the unconscious.

The positive side of that is that TV shows and movies can really help people see the connection between what might be an abstract Washington policy issue and real people's lives, even though it's fictional real people,

People understand what art is supposed to look like, and so it's easy to make something that looks like art but isn't - especially in an abstract form.

With the Larry Bertlemann portrait, I started with a photograph that I could use for it. I built the drawing's identity to serve as a graphic identity. After a number of sketches, I went into my own abstract vernacular of drawn lines and shapes to create the composition for the poster design.

Mahler's first symphony is not a typical symphony in that it's not abstract music; it does conjure up images of nature and images of heroism.

When I conform to truth, I do not conform to an abstract principle; I conform to the nature of God.

Twyla Tharp

I'm not satisfied sitting in just the world of abstract work.

Berthold Auerbach

Judaism lives not in an abstract creed, but in its institutions.

Since multinational giants couldn't have little pictures of red barns or weeping clowns in the lobbies of their Bauhaus buildings, Abstract Expressionism emerged as the world's most overrated form of interior decoration.

Stephen Merchant

The reason I keep talking about a wife and saying the word 'wife' on stage is because it seems a funny word to me. The more you say it, the more it seems to detach from that person and become this sort of abstract thing: that you would set out to find a wife, that it would be an objective like buying a new car.

The court took a standard that was intelligible, easy to apply and turned it into something that is subjective, abstract and impressionistic.

Theodor Svedberg

The investigations which have seemingly been the most purely abstract have often formed the foundation of the most important changes or improvements in the conditions of human life.

Aaron Huey

I wanted to be a painter, somewhere between Abstract Expressionism and Pop.

Vidya Balan

From Shakespeare to Robi Thakur, everyone has written stories about people and incidents around them. There is no creativity minus reality irrespective of how flowery or abstract you make it.

Lazaro Hernandez

You have something that exists in your head, and getting that abstract thought from your head into something that actually exists is a difficult process.

Wheelock was a man who would take an abstract concept and make it work.

In my view, the most damaging evils that are perpetrated upon us are through some abstract notion about good, where we're willing to sacrifice individuals in the present for some great vision of an improved or perfect future.

Jason Reitman

Can you design a Rorschach test that's going to make everyone feel something every time - and that looks like a Rorschach test? It's easy to show a picture of a kitten or a car accident. The question is, how abstract can you get and still get the audience to feel something when they don't know what's happening to them?

Nancy Gibbs

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.

David Rockefeller

Mother liked beauty wherever she found it, and she found it in many different places, both in nature and in contemporary art. And that's where they pretty much parted company. Father... anything that was abstract would to him automatically be not very good.

Jim Henson

Yeah, all the characters in those days were abstract because that was part of the principle that I was working under, that you wanted abstract things.

William Vickrey

This paper was one of my digressions into abstract economics.

Garry Wills

There's an interesting contrast between born Catholics and converts. Converts are often much more rule-directed. Catholicism isn't something that they breathed in from their childhood, so they think that if you don't toe the line on abstract doctrine you can't be part of the Church.

Elizabeth Warren

Writing laws based on an abstract theory, rather than reality, is a dangerous undertaking.

Roy Lichtenstein

I think we're much smarter than we were. Everybody knows that abstract art can be art, and most people know that they may not like it, even if they understand there's another purpose to it.

Jacques Lacan

But this emphasis would be lavished in vain, if it served, in your opinion, only to abstract a general type from phenomena whose particularity in our work would remain the essential thing for you, and whose original arrangement could be broken up only artificially.

Sophia Amoruso

A big practice in chaos magic is the use of sigils, which are abstract words or symbols you create and embed with your wishes.

Tim Wise

For people of color - especially African Americans - the idea that racist cops might frame members of their community is no abstract notion, let alone an exercise in irrational conspiracy theorizing. Rather, it speaks to a social reality about which blacks are acutely aware.

Zac Goldsmith

Climate change - for so long an abstract concern for an academic few - is no longer so abstract. Even the Bush administration's Climate Change Science Programme reports 'clear evidence of human influences on the climate system.'

Lev Vygotsky

The most significant moment in the course of intellectual development, which gives birth to the purely human forms of practical and abstract intelligence, occurs when speech and practical activity, two previously completely independent lines of development, converge.

I am truly excited about the quality of these three major sculptures, but also about the diversity of contemporary art being acquired by the museum. The range of work, from abstract to pop art to contemporary realism, demonstrate great breadth and significantly enhance the public art program in our area.

Roy Lichtenstein

But certainly the Abstract Expressionists were in a more romantic mode of painting, or give and take, than my paintings are seen to be anyway.

Malcolm Gladwell

I'm a lot more interested in people than I used to be. I used to be most interested in abstract ideas, and people were an afterthought, but that's changed a bit.