Best 81 quotes in «abstraction quotes» category

... Lyotard suggests that while discourse operates as a system of representation which defines meanings according to their relation to other concepts in that system, figure is the realm of the singular, of that which refuses to, or simply cannot, be captured and systematized by the concept.

Many were incarcerated with the aberrant prosaic possibilities of ataraxia. Only the mentally sensitive few were cognizant of the nuisance to serenity and an actuality that lacked a balance betwixt havoc and sangfroid. The intellectual capabilities of the excellent idiosyncratic talents of a man with an agog outlook for de minimis fringe entities had left the portal ajar for the enlightened few, to get a glimpse of the obsecure reality that most had decided to claim socratic ignorance to evade inquiries.

Monotheism and an absolute God define one another. The absolute is a mental construct, an abstract mental model. The absolute, whether it is a purest abstract essence or an extreme abstract measure, only exists in our minds as an abstraction. Furthermore, the absolute will only lead to the abandon of all measure and blind us to the relative interdependence of all things. The measure of knowledge of life is the knowledge of the measure of this relative interdependence.

Music is the most abstract of the arts; dance, the most concrete.

My mind seems to have become a kind of machine for grinding general laws out of large collections of facts, but why this should have caused the atrophy of that part of the brain alone, on which the higher tastes depend, I cannot conceive.

Remember that every science is based upon an abstraction. An abstraction is taking a point of view or looking at things under a certain aspect or from a particular angle. All sciences are differentiated by their abstraction.

People’s goodness or badness exists within not them but our minds.

Once we name something, you said, we can never see it the same way again. All that is unnameable falls away, gets lost, is murdered. You called this the cookie-cutter function of our minds. You said that you knew this not from shunning language but from immersion in it, on the screen, in conversation, onstage, on the page.

She really was pretty, for a grown-up, but when you are seven, beauty is an abstraction, not an imperative.

Sabism is deabstraction, metacolorism, thematism, exotic, convalescent substrate, soft act, collectivism, pluralization, sensationalism, pluralart, thematic colourism, reabstraction.

Similarities are read into nature by our nervous system, and so are structurally less fundamental than differences. Less fundamental, but no less important, as life and 'intelligence' would be totally impossible without abstracting. It becomes clear that the problem which has so excited the s.r. of the people of the United States of America and added so much to the merriment of mankind, 'Is the evolution a ''fact'' or a ''theory''?, is simply silly. Father and son are never identical - that surely is a structural 'fact' - so there is no need to worry about still higher abstractions, like 'man' and 'monkey'. That the fanatical and ignorant attack on the theory of evolution should have occured may be pathetic, but need concern us little, as such ignorant attacks are always liable to occur. But that biologists should offer 'defences' based on the confusions of orders of abstractiobs, and that 'philosophers' should have failed to see the simple dependence is rather sad. The problems of 'evolution' are verbal and have nothing to do with life as such, which is made up all through of different individuals, 'similarity' being structurally a manufactured article, produced by the nervous system of the observer.

The introduction of the digit 0 or the group concept was general nonsense too, and mathematics was more or less stagnating for thousands of years because nobody was around to take such childish steps...

Some people are more interested in making good on a promise—rather than in doing what they promised.

Whenever the mind tries to ascend into realms of new and sublime abstraction, matter persists and confines it in the cellar of habit.

The principle of conservation of boson number inside a system is seen to follow directly from the Abstraction Model. The IBMs are seen to obey the Laws of Physical Transaction that follows from Zero-Postulation. The chaotic superfields at the requisite scaling-ratio yields necessary equation-parameters needed to describe them at that given scaling-ratio. This is seen to be independent of the choice of scale, but at smaller scaling-ratios, we have less loss of information. At a higher scale, we seem to have less number of parameters required to describe them.

The propensity to excessive simplification is indeed natural to the mind of man, since it is only by abstraction and generalisation, which necessarily imply the neglect of a multitude of particulars, that he can stretch his puny faculties so as to embrace a minute portion of the illimitable vastness of the universe. But if the propensity is natural and even inevitable, it is nevertheless fraught with peril, since it is apt to narrow and falsify our conception of any subject under investigation. To correct it partially - for to correct it wholly would require an infinite intelligence - we must endeavour to broaden our views by taking account of a wide range of facts and possibilities; and when we have done so to the utmost of our power, we must still remember that from the very nature of things our ideas fall immeasurably short of the reality.

The world is too much for us. Rationality as we have come to know it works by ignoring most of experience: laws are arrived at by selective abstraction.

This capacity for living easily and familiarly at an extraordinary level of abstraction is the source of modern man's power. With it he has transformed the planet, annihilated space, and trebled the world's population. But it is also a power which has, like everything human, its negative side, in the desolating sense of rootlessness, vacuity, and the lack of concrete feeling that assails modern man in his moments of real anxiety.

Today we demand justice for the oppressed. We no longer accept atrocities as the inescapable fate of the defenceless. We desire and expect a better future. But when confronted with the enormity of injustice and what it demands of us, we retreat into the familiar ritual of intellectualization and moral posturing, recycling lofty liberal ideals from a safe distance. We avoid the intimate knowledge of suffering without which we will never understand the imperative of human rights.

The paradox of illuminating complexity is that it is inherently difficult to do so without erasing all of the nuance.

The symbol is not a mere formality; it is the very essence of algebra. Without the symbol the object is a human perception and reflects all the phases under which the human senses grasp it; replaced by a symbol the object becomes a complete abstraction, a mere operand subject to certain indicated operations.

We shall understand the mode of purification by confession, and that of contemplation by analysis, advancing by analysis to the first notion, beginning with the properties underlying it; abstracting from the body its physical properties, taking away the dimension of depth, then that of breadth, and then that of length. For the point which remains is a unit, so to speak, having position; from which if we abstract position, there is the conception of unity.

What, then, is truth? A mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, and anthropomorphisms – in short, a sum of human relations, which have been enhanced, transposed, and embellished poetically and rhetorically, and which after long use seem firm, canonical, and obligatory to a people: truths are illusions about which one has forgotten that this is what they are; metaphors which are worn out and without sensuous power; coins which have lost their pictures and now matter only as metal, no longer as coins.

Abstraction is an esoteric language.

You see, the notion of "sin" is for me an abstraction. There's no such thing as "sin". There's only such a thing as "tactlessness".

Abstraction and realism work best together.

Abstraction is everybody's zero but nobody's nought.

You have to be taught to recognize and care about differences, you have to be instructed who you really are; you have to learn how generations of dead people and their incomprehensible accomplishments made you the way you are; you have to define your loyalty to an abstraction-based herd that transcends your individuality.

Abstraction and luxury are the guard dogs of the upper class.

I'm an abstract painter not just for myself, but because I really believe in abstraction.

All art is an abstraction to some degree.

A perfume is more than an extract it is a presence in abstraction. A perfume, for me, is a mystique.

Gnosis is lived upon facts, withers away in abstractions, and is difficult to find even in the noblest of thoughts.

An abstraction will move a mountain: Nothing can withstand an idea.

By means of the sign, man frees himself from the here and now for abstraction.

Do not copy nature too much. Art is an abstraction.

Even at its most perceptive, sociology deals in abstractions.

Home is where the heart is, we say, rubbing the flint of one abstraction against another.

I expect of abstraction as much as what imagery does for me... to carry meaning.

I'm really interested in the nondefinitive element of abstraction.

I've always wondered, like, what is so masculine about abstraction? How did men get the ownership over this?

I prefer to see with closed eyes.

In my experience, you either have encapsulation and abstraction or you have neither. There is no middle ground.

I think we are living a life without specificity, and then our lives become abstractions.

I work in colour sometimes, but I guess the images I most connect to, historically speaking, are in black and white. I see more in black and white - I like the abstraction of it.

Nobody is driven by abstractions like 'seeking truth.

My work has the abstraction underneath it all now & what I deliberately set out to do down here, for this is the perfect realistic abstraction in landscape.

Life ain't a concept. Music is not a concept. My titles are poetic abstractions of something that is with me all the time, not necessarily in music, but in life. Everybody's life.

Poetry is an abstraction bloodied.

Oh abstractions are just abstract until they have an ache in them.