Best 81 quotes in «abstraction quotes» category

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.

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

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

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

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

I prefer to see with closed eyes.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

Nobody is driven by abstractions like 'seeking truth.

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

Poetry is an abstraction bloodied.

Pure drawing is an abstraction. Drawing and colour are not distinct, everything in nature is coloured.

That's what it is that you rehearse - the making of music, not the playing of notes as abstractions.

The cartooning was always just an abstraction. It was an income. It was making me famous. It was allowing me to go and do other things that I'd wanted to do.

The effective exploitation of his powers of abstraction must be regarded as one of the most vital activities of a competent programmer.

The Hindus have cultivated the power of analysis and abstraction. No nation has yet produced a grammar like that of Panini.

The past and the future are abstractions without any concrete reality.

There is nothing mysterious, as some have tried to maintain, about the applicability of mathematics. What we get by abstraction from something can be returned.

The story of evolution unfolds with increasing levels of abstraction.

To arrive at abstraction, it is always necessary to begin with a concrete reality.

When novels deal in abstractions, they generally go off the rails.

Yes, there was an element of abstraction and unreality in misfortune. But when an abstraction starts to kill you, you have to get to work on it.

Abstraction is the sickness of language.

Abstraction automatically gives rise to optimized solutions within the universal set of all possible solutions, as has been shown in this book. It is these optimized solutions that make up and drive the non-abstract parts of the world, while the non-optimized solutions remain ‘hidden’ from the material world, inside the abstract world. Starting from a basis of no postulation, we build our theory. As we go on piling up possibilities, we come to a similar basis for understanding the four non-contact forces of nature known till date. The difference in ranges of these forces is explained from this basis in this book. Zero postulation or abstraction as the basis of theory synthesis allows us to explore even imaginary and chaotic non-favoured solutions as possibilities. With no postulation as the fundamental basis, we are thus able to pile up postulated results or favoured results, but not the other way round. We keep describing such implications of abstraction in this book. We deal with the abstraction of observable parameters involved in a given system

Abstract means literally to draw from or separate. In this sense every artist is abstract.

All suffer and none should have to. But why not? If suffering makes life seem more real or more abstract, both circumstances are infinitely more bearable than the disturbing reality of mundane work-to-live-then-die-bored life.

...all this abstraction is also potentially distancing. We don't see the labor that went into building our railroads or the civilizations that were wiped out in order to clear the land. We don't see the millennia of dinosaurs or plankton that went into our oil, the Chinese repetitive stress injuries that went into our iPhones, or any of the other time-intensive processes we can spend in an instant today. We tend to see math and science as a steady state of facts rather than as the accumulated knowledge of linear traditions. As Korzybski put it, we see further because we "stand on the shoulders" of the previous generation.

A map is not the territory it represents, but, if correct, it has a similar structure to the territory, which accounts for its usefulness.

abstraction, n. Love is one kind of abstraction. And then there are those nights when I sleep alone, when I curl into a pillow that isn't you, when I hear the tiptoe sounds that aren't yours. It's not as if I can conjure you up completely. I must embrace the idea of you instead.

Both [social science & science fiction] attempt to understand empirical facts and lived experience as something that is shaped by abstract - and not directly perceptible - structural forces.

Challenge quandary thinking, either/or thinking come by moving from the abstract to the concrete. What can we do with the choice actually in front of us?

Forgotten Stars. Time in the Flame. Missing Shard. The Only Rain. Door of the Memory. Waves in the Silk. Silent Birch. Thoughts of Lunatics. Secret of the Flowers. Soaring of the Souls. Heart in the Night. And a Kiss Unfolds. Forgotten Voyager. Voyage in the Words. Nothing of the World. Someone of the Hemisphere. Trembling Stones. Sucking Tears. The Next Gift. The World in the Kisses. Missing Angels. The Woman of the Girl. Guardian of the Rings. Thorn in the Pearl. Whispering Sword. Touching exclaim. Soul in the Truth. Heat in the Flame. Thy name, my name, Thy name! Came. Became. To Remain.

Form itself, even if completely abstract ... has its own inner sound.

From the dawn of civilization, human beings have tried to find out order in the chaotic world surrounding them. It has however never been easy to find a solution to explain a given system while being a part of that system. The best bet is to find out the most fundamental components within the system and building a theory round these. In other words, a theory that is able to describe the world in totality has to keep the number of basic postulates it depends upon to zero or near zero.

If our ideas and beliefs are held with an awareness of abstracting, they can be changed if found to be inadequate or erroneous. But if they are held without an awareness of abstracting-if our mental maps are believed to be the territory-they are prejudices. As teachers or parents, we cannot help passing on to the young a certain amount of misinformation and error, however hard we may try not to. But if we teach them to be habitually conscious of the process of abstraction, we give them the means by which to free themselves from whatever erroneous notions we may have inadvertently taught them.

I imagined a labyrinth of labyrinths, a maze of mazes, a twisting, turning, ever-widening labyrinth that contained both past and future and somehow implied the stars. Absorbed in those illusory imaginings, I forgot that I was a pursued man; I felt myself, for an indefinite while, the abstract perceiver of the world. The vague, living countryside, the moon, the remains of the day did their work in me; so did the gently downward road, which forestalled all possibility of weariness. The evening was near, yet infinite.

Il est de toute nécessité que je perde conscience de la réalité individuelle de l'être que je puis être amené à supprimer.

In asking philosophical questions, we use a reason shaped by the body, a cognitive unconscious to which we have no direct access, and metaphorical thought of which we are largely unaware. The fact that abstract thought is mostly metaphorical means that answers to philosophical questions have always been, and always will be, mostly metaphorical. In itself, that is neither good nor bad. It is simply a fact about the capacities of the human mind. But it has major consequences for every aspect of philosophy. Metaphorical thought is the principal tool that makes philosophical insight possible and that constrains the forms that philosophy can take.

[I]t is important to underscore Kant’s basic point that the finitude of the human condition implies a life-long need for concrete moral examples and personal exemplars. With his second argument in defence of examples, we are no longer talking about a strategy of moral education that is to be applied only to children and that can be dispensed with once they reach adulthood. Adult human beings do have stronger powers of reflection and abstraction than do children. But even adults remain saddled with ‘a discursive image-dependent understanding’, and thus they will always need examples in order to make the law visible to themselves.

It is possible, indeed important, to be able to separate these two notions—to create procedures without naming them, and to give names to procedures that have already been created.

It must be this overarching commitment to what is really an abstraction, to one's children right or wrong, that can be even more fierce than the commitment to them as explicit, difficult people, and that can consequently keep you devoted to them when as individuals they disappoint. On my part it was this broad covenant with children-in-theory that I may have failed to make and to which I was unable to resort when Kevin finally tested my maternal ties to a perfect mathematical limit on Thursday. I didn't vote for parties, but for candidates. My opinions were as ecumenical as my larder, then still chock full of salsa verde from Mexico City, anchovies from Barcelona, lime leaves from Bangkok. I had no problem with abortion but abhorred capital punishment, which I suppose meant that I embraced the sanctity of life only in grown-ups. My environmental habits were capricious; I'd place a brick in our toilet tank, but after submitting to dozens of spit-in-the-air showers with derisory European water pressure, I would bask under a deluge of scalding water for half an hour. My closet wafter with Indian saris, Ghanaian wraparounds, and Vietnamese au dais. My vocabulary was peppered with imports -- gemutlich, scusa, hugge, mzungu. I so mixed and matched the planet that you sometimes worried I had no commitments to anything or anywhere, though you were wrong; my commitments were simply far-flung and obscenely specific. By the same token, I could not love a child; I would have to love this one. I was connected to the world by a multitude of threads, you by a few sturdy guide ropes. It was the same with patriotism: You loved the idea of the United States so much more powerfully than the country itself, and it was thanks to your embrace of the American aspiration that you could overlook the fact that your fellow Yankee parents were lining up overnight outside FAO Schwartz with thermoses of chowder to buy a limited release of Nintendo. In the particular dwells the tawdry. In the conceptual dwells the grand, the transcendent, the everlasting. Earthly countries and single malignant little boys can go to hell; the idea of countries and the idea of sons triumph for eternity. Although neither of us ever went to church, I came to conclude that you were a naturally religious person.

I was reminded of a painter friend who had started her career by depicting scenes from life, mainly deserted rooms, abandoned houses and discarded photographs of women. Gradually, her work became more abstract, and in her last exhibition, her paintings were splashes of rebellious color, like the two in my living room, dark patches with little droplets of blue. I asked about her progress from modern realism to abstraction. Reality has become so intolerable, she said, so bleak, that all I can paint now are the colors of my dreams.

... 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.