The canvas is the door to another dimension. The paintbrush is the key.

— Luhraw

The causal, abstract, binary, holistic, and reductionist functions of the human brain all help you to process the enormous amount of information coming into our brain from the external world every day.

— Abhijit Naskar

There is no branch of mathematics, however abstract, which may not some day be applied to phenomena of the real world.

— Nicholas Lobachevsky

These days, I'm finding it harder and harder to breathe. My chest pounds with every heart beat like you're here, again, standing in front of me, your two hands around my neck.

— Karen Quan

This earth is His, to Him belong those vast and boundless skies;Both seas within Him rest, and yet in that small pool He lies.

— Atharvaveda

To abstract is to draw out the essence of a matter. To abstract in art is to separate certain fundamentals from irrelevant material which surrounds them.

— Ben Shahn

We have come to understand the phenomena of life only as an assemblage of the lifeless. We take the mechanistic abstractions of our technical calculation to be ultimately concrete and "fundamentally real," while our most intimate experiences are labelled "mere appearance" and something having reality only within the closet of the isolated mind. Suppose however we were to invert this whole scheme, reverse the order in which it assigns abstract and concrete. What is central to our experience, then, need not be peripheral to nature. This sunset now, for example, caught within the network of bare winter branches, seems like a moment of benediction in which the whole of nature collaborates. Why shouldn't these colors and these charging banners of light be as much a part of the universe as the atoms and molecules that make them up? If they were only "in my mind," then I and my mind would no longer be a part of nature. Why should the pulse of life toward beauty and value not be a part of things? Following this path, we do not vainly seek to assemble the living out of configurations of dead stuff, but we descend downwards from more complex to simpler grades of the organic. From humans to trees to rocks; from "higher grade" to "lower grade" organisms. In the universe of energy, any individual thing is a pattern of activity within the flux, and thereby an organism at some level.

— William Barrett

When you live without someone for as long as I have, love becomes this abstract concept, something you attach to a memory. And when memories are that old, they feel like dreams, and you wonder if any of it was real, or if your mind created it all.

— Laura Thalassa

When you see a fish you don't think of its scales, do you? You think of its speed, its floating, flashing body seen through the water. Well, I've tried to express just that. If I made fins and eyes and scales, I would arrest its movement, give a pattern or shape of reality. I want just the flash of its spirits.

— Constantin Brancusi

When you’ve been given a curse of perspective you don’t stop to consider the gift of oversight that most humans have been bestowed with.

— Saim .A. Cheeda