Famous Quotes & Sayings

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.

William Vickrey

This paper was one of my digressions into abstract economics.

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.

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.

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.

The longer mathematics lives the more abstract - and therefore, possibly also the more practical - it becomes.

When driving on road, there is a statement said 'Drive safely!' Well, it was too abstract for me. Three things that make it practical: 1. Movement. Don't create a sudden movement to your vehicle. 2. Distance. Keep distance not too close with anything around. 3. The Eyes. Don't ever divert your eyes off the road.

John Leslie

We think we think in a very literal way, but if you really ponder it, you don't think in a literal way. You're seeing in a literal way, and you're going from point A to point B, but if you really consciously think back at what was going through your mind when you went from point A to point B, you'll find that it's a very abstract process.

David Ogilvy

Some manufacturers illustrate their advertisements with abstract paintings. I would only do this if I wished to conceal from the reader what I was advertising.

Oscar Wilde

The spirit of an age may be best expressed in the abstract ideal arts, for the spirit itself is abstract and ideal.

Michael Patrick King

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.

Harland Williams

I'd like to explore the more abstract side of people's minds, as opposed to the usual sitcom stuff. I don't want to do the typical sitcom-type humor. I'd want to do stuff like go bowling with pineapples.

David Sanborn

Usually there's some kind of clue, whether it's a rhythmic foundation or sometimes its very abstract - just an emotional kind of landscape - and then you just kind of start someplace.

Octavio Paz

Man is alone everywhere. But the solitude of the Mexican, under the great stone night of the high plateau that is still inhabited by insatiable gods, is very different from that of the North American, who wanders in an abstract world of machines, fellow citizens and moral precepts.

Octavio Paz

Abstract painting seeks to be a pure pictorial language, and thus attempts to escape the essential impurity of all languages: the recourse to signs or forms that have meanings shared by everyone.

Pierre Schaeffer

In contrast, traditional classical music starts from an abstract musical schema. This is then notated and only expressed in concrete sound as a last stage, when it is performed.

Menachem Begin

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.

What you're seeing right now with Katrina mirrors a lot of what the government does not do for families of Guard and Reserve soldiers: Throwing money at abstract concepts they love to do that but they really don't know how many of these families are suffering,

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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,

Ruth Ginsburg

You are well aware that I come to these proceedings to be judged as a judge. ... It would be wrong for me to say or to preview in this legislative chamber how I would cast my vote on questions the Supreme Court may be called upon to decide. ... Judges in our ... system are bound to decide concrete cases, not abstract issues. ... A judge sworn to decide impartially can offer no forecasts, no hints. ... It would display disdain for the entire judicial process.

John Leslie

A painting... is just one image. It allows you to elaborate, dwell on that one picture, go off on it because no further images are forced upon you. But the motion picture is always changing. So what you have to do is create some kind of eye field, an abstract form in a literal sense that tries to emulate what the brain is perceiving, not what the eye is seeing.

In 1971, I put together the 'Johnny Face' drawing as a concept, with the words as part of an image in a circle. Combining my abstract drawing with the headline 'Crazy World Ain't It' created an emblem and became a button.

In another 10,000 or 20,000 years, I think the human brain may acquire a form that is quite different than the human brain today. Not necessarily in its shape, which may remain relatively the same. But the function may be different. It may be, on average, a little smarter. Or it may acquire certain skills that in its current form it isn't well-equipped to handle -- advanced cognitive abilities such as abstract reasoning. We don't really know for sure how -- but we are still evolving.

Damon Galgut

I'm fascinated by how much has changed from one generation to another. There are young people growing up now for whom apartheid is just a distant memory and the idea of military service is an abstract notion.

Ronald Coase

The tools used by economists to analyze business firms are too abstract and speculative to offer any guidance to entrepreneurs and managers in their constant struggle to bring novel products to consumers at low cost.