#abstract

I think most people, when they think about the Black Panther Party, they think in very abstract, caricatured terms. They think about black fists in the air, but they don't think about the actual people, and the families, and the relationships. ↗

— Kerry Washington

#abstract #actual #air #black #families

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

#arts #feelings #music #neuroscience #art

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. ↗

— Pierre Schaeffer

#classical #classical music #concrete #contrast #expressed

Abstraction is everybody's zero but nobody's nought. ↗

— Robert Smithson

#everybody #nobody #nought #zero

History is representational, while time is abstract; both of these artifices may be found in museums, where they span everybody's own vacancy. ↗

— Robert Smithson

#artifices #both #everybody #found #history

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

— Dennis Prager

#easier #hits #home #position #take

Men do not fight for flag or country, for the Marine Corps or glory or any other abstraction. They fight for one another. And if you came through this ordeal, you would age with dignity. ↗

— William Manchester

#age #another #any #came #corps

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

#abstraction #fear #fear-of-truth #god #truth

Abstract words such as glory, honor, courage, or hallow were obscene beside the concrete names of villages, the numbers of roads, the names of rivers, the numbers of regiments and the dates. ↗

— Ernest Hemingway

#courage #glory #honor #courage

Abstraction can provide stumbling blocks for people of strange intelligence. ↗

— Gustave Flaubert

#intelligence #intelligence