Concrete Experience Quotes

I have come to believe, deeply and firmly, that we can create a poverty free world if we want to. I came to this conclusion not as a product of a pious dream, but as a concrete result of experience gained in the work of the Grameen Bank.

The work of art is born of the intelligence's refusal to reason the concrete. It marks the triumph of the carnal.

If you want to understand what a watermelon is, you take a watermelon, get a knife, and cut the watermelon. Then you put a slice in your mouth. Boom! YOUR experience!

Art always opts for the individual, the concrete; art is not Platonic.

I think it's always easier to play parts that you have something concrete that you can relate to.

Story is the oldest, commonest, most beloved, and most effective form of communication because our life is essentially a story. That's why the Bible is the most realistic of religious books. We can easily ignore or argue away abstractions, but we bump up against concretely real people, things, and events in story, as in life.

Only if you bring together the experience of the concrete struggles conducted by the real masses in the three sectors of the world (which are also called the three sectors of world revolution), then you have an overall, correct view of world reality.

Quality is a direct experience independent of and prior to intellectual abstractions.

Looking out of my window this lovely spring morning I see an azalea in full bloom. No, no! I do not see that; though that is the only way I can describe what I see. That is a proposition, a sentence, a fact; but what I perceive is not proposition, sentence, fact, but only an image which I make intelligible in part by means of a statement of fact. This statement is abstract; but what I see is concrete.

The artist's life nourishes itself on the particular, the concrete.

Far from affording artists continuous inspiration, mass-media sources for art have become a dead end. They have combined with the abstractness of institutional art teaching to produce a fine-arts culture given over to information and not experience. This faithfully echoes the drain of concreteness from modern existence- the reign of mere unassimilated data instead of events that gain meaning by being absorbed into the fabric of imaginative life.

We tend to describe climate change in terms that are abstract—a one degree rise in temperature, an increase in green house gasses—but when waves wash away a village, that’s concrete and very emotional.

If they are, then the only ultimate truths are the particulars of concrete experience, and no postulate or general assumption is inherent in science until its proceedings become systematic, or the truths already reached give direction to further research.

This is our dilemma--either to taste and not to know or to know and not to taste--or, more strictly, to lack one kind of knowledge because we are in an experience or to lack another kind because we are outside it. [. . .] Of this tragic dilemma myth is the partial solution. In the enjoyment of a great myth we come nearest to experiencing as a concrete what can otherwise be understood only as an abstraction.

I am for an art that takes into account the direct effect of the elements as they exist from day to day apart from representation.