Best 81 quotes in «abstraction quotes» category

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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".

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 realism work best together.

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

Abstraction is an esoteric language.

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

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

All art is an abstraction to some degree.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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 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'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.

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

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.

Nobody is driven by abstractions like 'seeking truth.

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

Poetry is an abstraction bloodied.

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

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.

Abstraction is the sickness of language.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.