#abstract

My interest in desperation lies only in that sometimes I find myself having become desperate. Very seldom do I start out that way. I can see of course that, in the abstract, thinking and all activity is rather desperate. ↗

— Willem de Kooning

#activity #become #course #desperate #desperation

At that point it certainly would be called abstract. That is to say, you had a model and there'd be one or two or three people there drawing the model but otherwise you had abstractions all around the room, even though the model was in front of you. ↗

— Lee Krasner

#around #called #certainly #drawing #even

It was the point where things became much more abstract and less literal than in the bulk of the film, which was hardcore rockets and space and planets - all a fairly straightforward evolution from what I had been doing before. ↗

— Douglas Trumbull

#became #been #before #bulk #doing

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

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. ↗

— Jacques Lacan

#arrangement #artificially #broken #could #emphasis

I hardly need to abstract things, for each object is unreal enough already, so unreal that I can only make it real by means of painting. ↗

— Max Beckmann

#already #each #enough #hardly #i

You can define a net two ways, depending on your point of view. Normally you would say it is a meshed instrument designed to catch fish. But you could, with no great injury to logic, reverse the image and define the net as a jocular lexicographer once did: he called it a collection of holes tied together with string. ↗

— Julian Barnes

#language #design

One thus sees that a new kind of theory is needed which drops these basic commitments and at most recovers some essential features of the older theories as abstract forms derived from a deeper reality in which what prevails in unbroken wholeness. ↗

— David Bohm

#basic #commitments #deeper #derived #drops

We invoke the sacrifices of our fallen heroes in the abstract, but we seldom take time to thank them individually. ↗

— Rahm Emanuel

#fallen #heroes #individually #invoke #our