“Art – when it is really doing what it should do – teaches abstract thinking; it teaches teamwork; it teaches people to actually think about things that they cannot see.”

Movement begins to negotiate the distance between the brain and the body and it can be surprising what we learn about each other.

An artist should… bring into the world some vision. Dancers should ask, “What is their work in the service of?”

The body is a reservoir of all sorts of tensions and dark forces. And it’s also the potential source of amazing energy. This thing wants to live. It is a powerful engine.

The brain (is) a reservoir of images, dreams, fears, associations, language. And its potential we can’t even begin to understand.

A form if it breathes some, if it has some enigma to it, it is also the enigma that is the abstract, I would think.

Everybody knows that abstract art can be art, and most people know that they may not like it, even if they understand there’s another purpose to it.

One of the fundamental reasons why so many doctors become cynical and disillusioned is precisely because, when the abstract idealism has worn thin, they are uncertain about the value of the actual lives of the patients they are treating.

I was a really lousy artist as a kid. Too abstract expressionist; or I’d draw a big ram’s head, really messy.

I don’t like [to] make a woman … an abstract concept of the fashion. I don’t like [to] say, “You must wear that.” … I am not a dictator.

Each department of knowledge passes through three stages. The theoretic stage; the theological stage and the metaphysical or abstract stage.

I am sure I was an evolutionist in the abstract, or by the quality and complexion of my mind, before I read Darwin, but to become an evolutionist in the concrete, and accept the doctrine of the animal origin of man, has not for me been an easy matter.

Whitman was Emerson translated from the abstract into the concrete.