#abstract

Every abstract picture of the world is as impossible as a blueprint of a storm. Don't be ashamed because you're human: be proud! Inside you, vaults behind vaults open endlessly. You will never be finished, and that's as it should be. ↗

— Tomas Transtromer

#ashamed #because #behind #blueprint #endlessly

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

What is important, then, is not that the critic should possess a correct abstract definition of beauty for the intellect, but a certain kind of temperament, the power of being deeply moved by the presence of beautiful objects. ↗

— Walter Pater

#beautiful #beauty #being #certain #correct

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

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. ↗

— Theodor Svedberg

#been #changes #conditions #formed #foundation

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

— Berthold Auerbach

#creed #institutions #judaism #lives

I am at war... with the principal personage of traditional philosophy, that abstract subject who masquerades as everyone and anyone, but is really a male subject in disguise. ↗

— Pam Gems

#am #anyone #disguise #everyone #i

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

Colour is a power which directly influences the soul. ↗

— Wassily Kandinsky

#art #paintings #science #art