Abbie Hoffman Quotes

If I try to articulate every little detail in a drawing, it would be like missing the forest for the trees, so it's just about getting the outline of the forest.

I get very caught up in the day-to-day and immersed in the scenes as they unfold. It's harder for me, as I'm filming, to see the larger story.

One sees great things from the valley; only small things from the peak.

Sometimes it's best to speak from ignorance: that way, you can see the wood without being distracted by the trees.

‎Be careful not to keep your eyes glued to detail. Stand far enough away to get a perspective of the whole.

You can't see the forest for the trees.

The best designers in the world all squint when they look at something. They squint to see the forest from the trees - to find the right balance. Squint at the world. You will see more, by seeing less.

When we pull back and get, for a moment, the 'bird's eye' view of life, it reveals meanings that are ungraspable by the narrow focus of our usual worm's eye view

The trick to forgetting the big picture is to look at everything close-up.

You can't see all of a place until you look at it from a distance.

It's a matter of reducing the work to its very simplest possible state, eliminating all of the things that lead away from the guts of the work, the thing the work is really about. Anything that's there must build towards its over-all organization and meaning.

In my writing, I focus lenses. I'm almost always seeing when I am writing.

You know, when people look at a tree, they look at the leaves; they don't look at the spaces between the leaves. They're focused on the tree. I think there's an awareness of spaces or it wouldn't look like a tree to them.

Creativity has more to do with the elimination of the inessential than with inventing something new.

I think when you take forever off the table, it does something really interesting to what you think is important. There's something a little freeing about it.

It is easy to answer the ultimate questions - it saves you bothering with the immediate ones.

Problems look mighty small from 150 miles up.

When you're playing, every ball seems like the biggest event. When you're sitting back, you can see the overall picture better.

I look at everything from 100,000 feet.

Sometimes you need to be aware of the bigger picture you are missing.

I wanted to understand things and then be free of them. I needed to learn how to telescope things, ideas. Things were too big to see all at once, like all the books in the library-everything laying around on all the tables. You might be able to put it all into one paragraph or into one verse of a song if you could get it right.

I feel a sudden clear focus and perspective. There is no time for anything inessential.

Always keep things in perspective.

One of the most significant design principles is to omit the unimportant in order to emphasize the important.

The hues of the opal, the light of the diamond, are not to be seen if the eye is too near.