We call those works of art concrete that came into being on the basis of their inherent resources and rules - without external borrowing from natural phenomena, without transforming those phenomena, in other words: not by abstraction.
Even at its most perceptive, sociology deals in abstractions.
Abstraction is real, probably more real than nature.
I have this certain vision of the way I want my comics to look; this sort of photographic realism, but with a certain abstraction that comics can give. It's kind of a fine line.
I felt like my parents were always involved with abstraction, and I wanted to do something very specific.
The economy is not an abstraction. The economy consists of people, and it will only grow if people feel secure and are reasonably free.
Whatever life may really be, it is to us an abstraction: for the word is a generalised term to signify that which is common to all animals and plants, and which is not directly operative in the inorganic world.
Washington isn't a city, it's an abstraction.
I'd say that my profession ends where architectural thinking ends - architectural thinking in terms of thinking about programs and organizational structure. These abstractions play a role in many other disciplines, and those disciplines are now defining their 'architectures' as well.
When you're doing a film, narrative is your most important tool, but it's a tool to create a cinematographic experience, to create those moments that are beyond narrative, that are almost an abstraction of that moment that hits your psyche.
An administrator in a bureaucratic world is a man who can feel big by merging his non-entity in an abstraction. A real person in touch with real things inspires terror in him.
The Geometer has the special privilege to carry out, by abstraction, all constructions by means of the intellect. Who, then, would wish to prevent me from freely considering figures hanging on a balance imagined to be at an infinite distance beyond the confines of the world?
The city - as the theater of experience, the refuge, the hiding place - has, in turn, been replaced by an abstraction, the fast lane. In the fast lane, the passive observer reduces everything - streets, people, rock lyrics, headlines - to landscape. Every night holds magical promises of renewal. But burnout is inevitable, like some law of physics.
I'm really interested in the nondefinitive element of abstraction.
Enjoying art is a personal matter. It's made up by contemplation, silence, abstraction.
Music, first of all, is completely about abstraction, which is exactly what architecture is not. In a way, it has been incredibly constructive to know what true abstraction is. So you don't fall into the trap of thinking that what you do is abstract.
That's what it is that you rehearse - the making of music, not the playing of notes as abstractions.
Experts are able to identify patterns related to a specific problem relevant to their area of knowledge. But because nonexperts lack that base of knowledge, they are forced to rely more on their brain's ability for abstraction rather than specificity.
I have a hard time with abstractions. I always go to the personal.
I don't like the word 'abstractions' very much because most people don't think in abstractions. That is too difficult for them. They think in stories. And the best stories are not abstract; they are concrete.
When people hear the term 'political prisoner,' especially on the Left, it becomes a kind of abstraction. Folks are aware of injustice, and they're aware that there are folks in prison who are in prison, you know, largely because of their activism.
A study, by its very nature, is an abstraction.
When novels deal in abstractions, they generally go off the rails.
Calling a book 'young adult' is only important in that it can help get a book to the right reader. After that, it's a useless abstraction and should be discarded.
I think there's something really painful about your identity being entirely composed of ghosts. For me, I didn't want to be this kid whose Dominicanness was something caught utterly in the past, is an abstraction, the thing that I write about. Instead I wanted it to be, first and foremost, a thing that I lived.
Developing Christlike attributes in our lives is not an easy task, especially when we move away from generalities and abstractions and begin to deal with real life. The test comes in practicing what we proclaim.
I have been writing fairy tales for as long as I can remember. Not much has changed in terms of my natural attraction to the narrative techniques of fairy tales. My appreciation of them in the traditional stories has deepened, especially of flat and unadorned language, intuitive logic, abstraction, and everyday magic.
Painter after painter, since the beginning of the century, has tended toward abstraction. First, the Impressionists simplified the landscape in terms of color, and then the Fauves simplified it again by adding distortion, which, for some reason, is a characteristic of our century.
