Quotes & Sayings About Abstract Beauty

I have tried to integrate the spirituality into the training in a way that meets my need not to destroy the beauty of it through abstract philosophizing. — Marshall B. Rosenberg

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

Wisdom is the abstract of the past, but beauty is the promise of the future. — Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

Painting is a duality and abstract painting is an entirely aesthetic thing. It always remains on one level. It is only really interesting in the beauty of its patterns or its shapes. — Francis Bacon

Beauty and happiness and life are all the same and they are pervasive, unattached and abstract and they are our only concern. They are immeasurable, completely lacking in substance. They are perfect and sublime. This is the subject matter of art. — Agnes Martin

Our society gives its economy priority over health, love, truth, beauty, sex and salvation; over life itself. Whatsoever is given precedence over life will take precedence over life, and will end in eliminating life. Since economics, at its most abstract level, is the religion of our people, no noneconomic happening, not even one as potentially spectacular as the Second Coming, can radically alter the souls of our people. — Tom Robbins

Most people gawked at her because of her exotic appearance or stared with envy at her beauty. However, he always looked at her in a studious way, as if he was trying to piece her together like she was a marble puzzle. A statue he was constructing from parts of her abstract soul. — Sarah Noffke

I blink rapidly, breaking our reverie and force myself to focus on something,anything, other than his beauty. Or his body. A body I want pressed against mine, limbs and tongues twisted and tangled, our flesh contortioned into X-rated abstract art ... — S.L. Jennings

Poets are not so scrupulous as you are. They know how useful passion is for publication. Nowadays a broken heart will run to many editions."
"I hate them for it," cried Hallward. "An artist should create beautiful things, but should put nothing of his own life into them. We live in an age when men treat art as if it were meant to be a form of autobiography. We have lost the abstract sense of beauty. Some day I will show the world what is it; and for that the world shall never see my portrait of Dorian Gray. — Oscar Wilde

Looking back on that time it seems to me that such rapture over Tarkovsky by an audience most of whom would not have known how to spell his name, and who would under normal circumstances have ignored or even disliked his work, arose from our intense sensory deprivation. We were thirsty for some form of beauty, even in an incomprehensible, overintellectual, abstract film with no subtitles and censored out of recognition. There was a sense of wonder at being in a public place for the first time in years without fear or anger, being in a place with a crowd of strangers that was not a demonstration, a protest rally, a breadline or a public execution. — Azar Nafisi

Women have no sense of the abstract-a woman admiring the sky is a woman caressing the sky. In a woman's mind beauty is something she needs to touch. — Jean Giraudoux

The levelling of the European man is the great process which cannot be obstructed; it should even be accelerated. The necessity of cleaving gulfs, distance, order of rank, is therefore imperative - not the necessity of retarding this process. This homogenizing species requires justification as soon as it is attained: its justification is that it lies in serving a higher and sovereign race which stands upon the former and can raise itself this task only by doing this. Not merely a race of masters whose sole task is to rule, but a race with its own sphere of life, with an overflow of energy for beauty, bravery, culture, and manners, even for the most abstract thought; a yea-saying race that may grant itself every great luxury - strong enough to have no need of the tyranny of the virtue-imperative, rich enough to have no need of economy or pedantry; beyond good and evil; a hothouse for rare and exceptional plants. — Friedrich Nietzsche

I fear that even if it is beautiful in the abstract, that my doing it knowing that it's beautiful and worse, knowing that I will very soon be documenting it, that in my pocket is a tape recorder brought for just that purpose - that all this makes this act of potential beauty somehow gruesome. I am a monster. — Dave Eggers

Sometimes--as it was happening now--the music on the radio matched the rhythm of the bridge. The cables climbed toward the second arch, and she felt herself in the uncanny presence of beauty. Nothing else in her day stirred her to the contemplation of abstract ideas. The bridge was making an argument for its own soundness as she drove over it. — Matthew Thomas

Mathematics expresses values that reflect the cosmos, including orderliness, balance, harmony, logic, and abstract beauty. — Deepak Chopra

Beauty too often sacrifices to fashion. The spirit of fashion is not the beautiful, but the wilful; not the graceful, but the fantastic; not the superior in the abstract, but the superior in the worst of all concretes,-the vulgar. — Leigh Hunt

It may be said that the Master was plagued in his last match by modern rationalism, to which fussy rules were everything, from which all the grace and elegance of Go as art had disappeared, which quite dispensed with respect for elders and attached no importance to mutual respect as human beings. From the way of Go the beauty of Japan and the Orient had fled. Everything had become science and regulation. The road to advancement in rank, which controlled the life of a player, had become a meticulous point system. One conducted the battle only to win, and there was no margin for remembering the dignity and the fragrance of Go as an art. The modern way was to insist upon doing battle under conditions of abstract justice ... — Yasunari Kawabata

Good-nature is that benevolent and amiable temper of mind which disposes us to feel the misfortunes and enjoy the happiness of others, and, consequently, pushes us on to promote the latter and prevent the former; and that without any abstract contemplation on the beauty of virtue, and without the allurements or terrors of religion. — Henry Fielding

Beauty, like all other qualities presented to human experience, is relative; and the definition of it becomes unmeaning and useless in proportion to its abstractness. To define beauty not in the most abstract, but in the most concrete terms possible, not to find a universal formula for it, but the formula which expresses most adequately this or that special manifestation of it, is the aim of the true student of aesthetics. — Walter Pater

We feel the beauty of nature because we are part of nature and because we know that however much in our separate domains we abstract from the unity of Nature, this unity remains. Although we may deal with particulars, we return finally to the whole pattern woven out of these. — Ernest Everett Just

Sawbeaked epitome of bodiless Idea, tossed by gusts of ether, dive Through abstract mists and raid the sea of fact Eat rich strange fish, grow long bright feathers, press Form's flesh around thought's rib, and so derive From the act of beauty, beauty of the act. — Philip Jose Farmer

Mother liked beauty wherever she found it, and she found it in many different places, both in nature and in contemporary art. And that's where they pretty much parted company. Father ... anything that was abstract would to him automatically be not very good. — David Rockefeller

A mismatched outfit, a slightly defective denture, an exquisite mediocrity of the soul-those are the details that make a woman real, alive. The women you see on posters or in fashion magazines-the ones all the women try to imitate nowadays-how can they be attractive? They have no reality of their own; they're just the sum of a set of abstract rules. They aren't born of human bodies; they hatch ready-made from the computers." ~The Book of Laughter and Forgetting — Milan Kundera

As far as life is concerned, there is no such thing as "Nature". There are only homes. Home is that environment to which the individual has become adapted; and almost everything is unnatural outside his range of adaptation. Harmonious equilibrium with nature is an abstract concept with a Platonic beauty but lacking the flesh and blood of life. It fails, in particular, to convey the creative emergent quality of human existence. — Rene Dubos

Praise or blame has but a momentary effect on the man whose love of beauty in the abstract makes him a severe critic on his own works. — John Keats

The inner life has its soft and gentle beauty; an abstract formlessness as well as a subtle charm. I often consider myself as a figure in a foggy painting: faltering lines, insecure distances, and a merging of greys and blacks. An emotion or a mood - a mere wisp of color - is shaded off and made to spread until it becomes one with all that surrounds it. — Virginia Woolf

Beauty is a type of art everyone is trying to perfect, but no one realizes it's abstract art. — Keaton Stromberg

I'd take you home with me, see, but two of us in the same Behold? Just wouldn't work, ends up in all sorts of squabbles over interior design; and the human, well, one faery in the Behold of the Eye, that just gives them a little twinkle of imagination, but more than one and it's like a bloody fireworks display. They get all unstable and artistic, blinded by the glamour of everything, real or imagined, concrete or abstract. They get confused between beauty and truth and meaning, you see, start thinking every butterfly-brained idea must be true; before you know it they've gone schizo on you and you're in a three-way firefight with all the angels and the demons, them and their bloody ideologies. — Hal Duncan

There's an immense dramatic possibility in describing that universe. The books, for me, were an enormous relief in that sense of how they were written to allow primary emotion, elemental emotion, to matter enormously but to give the thing an extraordinary flow so you don't notice at what point that you're actually overwhelmed by this. There's no showiness, at all. It's the opposite of showiness. I think, if it was a painting, it could be very grey abstract, almost, with some lines and very, very beautiful. But you wouldn't have a notion of where the beauty was.
(Talking about the short stories of Alistair MacLeod, who he discovered while working on The Modern Library.) — Colm Toibin

Dada demonstrated that a society that had lost respect was no longer in a position to demand that the artist adhere to its aesthetic and ideological values. The bourgeois idea of beauty had become ridiculous. Poetry was now abstract and based on sound. Rather than focusing on representation, painters now worked with their material for its own sake in terms of its colour, form and structure. The element of chance was treated as a creative process, that freed the artist from the alienation of conditioning. — Marc Dachy

Beauty is in the mind, not the eye. — Agnes Martin

In the history of science it happens not infrequently that a reductionist approach leads to a spectacular success. Frequently the understanding of a complicated system as a whole is impossible without an understanding of its component parts. And sometimes the understanding of a whole field of science is suddenly advanced by the discover of a single basic equation. Thus it happened that the Schrodinger equation in 1926 and the Dirac equation in 1927 brought a miraculous order into the previously mysterious processes of atomic physics. The equations of Erwin Schrodinger and Paul Dirac were triumphs of reductionism. Bewildering complexities of chemistry and physics were reduced to two lines of algebraic symbols. These triumphs were in Oppenheimer's mind when he belittled his own discovery of black holes. Compared with the abstract beauty and simplicity of the Dirac equation, the black hole solution seemed to him ugly, complicated, and lacking in fundamental significance. — Freeman Dyson

One by one, they guessed aloud about what Lotto had meant by this sculpture: nautilus, fiddlehead, galaxy. Thread running off its spindle. Forces of nature, perfect in beauty, perfectly ephemeral, they guessed. He was too shy to say time. He'd woken with a dry tongue and the urge to make the abstract concrete, to build his new understanding: that this was the way that time was, a spiral. — Lauren Groff

One great distinction, I appeared to myself to see plainly between even the characteristic faults of our elder poets, and the false beauty of the moderns. In the former, from Donne to Cowley, we find the most fantastic out-of-the-way thoughts, but in the most pure and genuine mother English, in the latter the most obvious thoughts, in language the most fantastic and arbitrary. Our faulty elder poets sacrificed the passion and passionate flow of poetry to the subtleties of intellect and to the stars of wit; the moderns to the glare and glitter of a perpetual, yet broken and heterogeneous imagery, or rather to an amphibious something, made up, half of image, and half of abstract meaning. The one sacrificed the heart to the head; the other both heart and head to point and drapery. — Samuel Taylor Coleridge

As for mending, I think its good to take the time to fix something rather than throw it away. Its an antidote to wastefulness and to the need for immediate gratification. You get to see a whole process through, beginning to end, nothing abstract about it. You'll always notice the fabric scar, of course, but there's an art to mending. If you're careful, the repair can actually add to the beauty of the think because it is a testimony to its worth. — Elizabeth Berg

We were thirsty for some form of beauty, even in an incomprehensible, overintellectual, abstract film with no subtitles and censored out of recognition. There was a sense of wonder at being in a public place for the first time in years without fear or anger, being in a place with a crowd of strangers that was not a demonstration, a protest rally, a breadline or a public execution...For a brief time we experienced collectively the kind of awful beauty that can only be grasped at through extreme anguish and expressed through art. — Azar Nafisi

The poetic beauty of Davy's mind never seems to have left him. To that circumstance I would ascribe the distinguishing feature in his character, and in his discoveries,-a vivid imagination sketching out new tracts in regions unexplored, for the judgement to select those leading to the recesses of abstract truth. — Davies Gilbert

Because sometimes the Church seems like those posed circus tableaus where the curtain lifts and men, white, zinc-oxide, talcum-powder statues, freeze to represent abstract Beauty. Very wonderful. But I hope there will always be room for me to dart about among the statues, don't you, Father Stone? — Ray Bradbury

Abstract expressionism was the first American art that was filled with anger as well as beauty. — Robert Motherwell

Many attempts have been made by writers on art and poetry to define beauty in the abstract, to express it in the most general terms, to find some universal formula for it. — Walter Pater