Best 81 quotes in «abstraction quotes» category

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.

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.

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.

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

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 is an esoteric language.

Abstraction and realism work best together.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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'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.

I prefer to see with closed eyes.

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

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.

Nobody is driven by abstractions like 'seeking truth.

Poetry is an abstraction bloodied.

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

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

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

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 story of evolution unfolds with increasing levels of abstraction.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

Abstraction is the sickness of language.

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.

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.

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.

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.