Famous Quotes & Sayings

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.

Berthold Auerbach

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

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.

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,

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,

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.

If you abstract away to the business logic, then you can just deal with that rather than having to worry about the system behind it.

William Vickrey

This paper was one of my digressions into abstract economics.

Samuel Coleridge

Rights! There are no rights whatever without corresponding duties. Look at the history of the growth of our constitution, and you will see that our ancestors never upon any occasion stated, as a ground for claiming any of their privileges, an abstract right inherent in themselves; you will nowhere in our parliamentary records find the miserable sophism of the Rights of Man.

Restoring the canyon is no longer an abstract notion now that people can actually experience its beauty.

Rich Sommer

Part of what I love about games is that, even if you're best friends with somebody, it gives you these sort of moments where you get to interact on a completely different level. You all agree to these abstract rules, but there's nobody holding a gun to your head.

Our language is polarized. Concrete words are usually the language of poets. Abstract words are usually the language of politicians.

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.

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.

Mark Williams

Everything is so abstract at this point. All that has to be worked out.

Every innovation occasions more harm and and derangement of order by its novelty, than benefit by its abstract utility

William Gibson

Cyberspace was a consensual hallucination that felt and looked like a physical space but actually was a computer-generated construct representing abstract data.

Ed Kowalczyk

This song probably has the most memorable melody we've ever recorded. I really like how we're using something so catchy to convey these abstract lyrical ideas I have about songwriting. When I sit down to write a song, I always feel like I'm wading into a river where a nurturing female presence guides me and pushes me along when I need it.

What attracted me to it was a series of X-ray photographs of the internals of those beautiful abstract works,

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.

Phil Klay

I started with things that I was troubled by or confused by or interested in, and then I wrote stories to try to puzzle my way through it. But the question is not how to represent war, because it's an abstract thing that's felt differently for all the characters.

I sometimes wish I had been educated a Catholic, in order to unite the poetry of religion with its higher principles. Are they necessarily inseparable? Is man really so much of a philosopher, that he can conceive of truth in its abstract purity, and divest life and the affections of all the aids of the imagination?

I've been doing a lot of abstract painting lately, extremely abstract. No brush, no paint, no canvas, I just think about it.

Do you not see, first, that - as a mental abstract - physical force is directly opposed to morality; and secondly, that it practically drives out of existence the moral forces?

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

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.

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.