Abstract Quotes - Page 25

• Sexuality is primarily a means of communicating with other people, a way of talking to them, of expressing our feelings about ourselves and them. It is essentially a language, a body language, in which one can express gentleness and affection, anger and resentment, superiority and dependence far more succinctly than would be possible verbally, where expressions are unavoidably abstract and often clumsy.

  Robert C. Solomon

  Sex, Mean, Expression

  Robert C. Solomon (1987). “From Hegel to Existentialism”, p.130, Oxford University Press

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• What we grieve for is not the loss of a grand vision, but rather the loss of common things, events and gestures.... ordinariness is the most precious thing we struggle for, what the Jews of the Warsaw Ghetto fought for. Not noble causes or abstract theories. But the right to go on living with a sense of purpose and a sense of self-worth--an ordinary life.

  Irena Klepfisz

  Grief, Struggle, Ghetto

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• Sanctuary cities are a lot like hitchhiking. And the abstract, it feels really good until you feel dead.

  Greg Gutfeld

  Cities, Hitchhiking, Sanctuary

  Source: www.foxnews.com

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• There is certainly a part of my filmmaking that harkens to a more simpler commercial kind of taste, but then with this theres certainly a kind of avant-garde, abstract, existential element to it.

  J. C. Chandor

  Avant Garde, Elements, Taste

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• Freedom is not merely a word or an abstract theory, but the most effective instrument for advancing the welfare of man.

  John F. Kennedy

  Men, Welfare, Theory

  Kennedy, John F. (1962). “Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: John F. Kennedy, 1961”, p.548, Best Books on

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• How much more the seeker of abstract truth, who needs periods of isolation, and rapt concentration, and almost a going out of thebody to think!

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Truth, Thoughtful, Thinking

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (2009). “The Essential Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson”, p.637, Modern Library

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• A work of art is an abstract or epitome of the world. It is the result or expression of nature, in miniature. For, although the works of nature are innumerable and all different, the result or the expression of them all is similar and single.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Art, Expression, Different

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (2012). “Nature and Other Essays”, p.9, Courier Corporation

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• The irrational may be attractive in the abstract, but not in cab drives, dinner guests, or elderly relatives.

  Mason Cooley

  Elderly, Dinner Guests, May

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• The presentation of mathematics in schools should be psychological and not systematic. The teacher, so to speak, should be a diplomat. He must take account of the psychic processes in the boy in order to grip his interest, and he will succeed only if he presents things in a form intuitively comprehensible. A more abstract presentation is only possible in the upper classes.

  Felix Klein

  Teacher, School, Boys

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• To desire money is much nobler than to desire success. Desiring money may mean desiring to return to your country, or marry the woman you love, or ransom your father from brigands. But desiring success must mean that you take an abstract pleasure in the unbrotherly act of distancing and disgracing other men.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Country, Money, Father

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• "What is truth?" said jesting Pilate, and would not stay for an answer. Pilate was in advance of his time. For "truth" itself is an abstract noun, a camel, that is, of a logical construction, which cannot get past the eye even of a grammarian. We approach it cap and categories in hand: we ask ourselves whether Truth is a substance (the Truth, the Body of Knowledge), or a quality (something like the colour red, inhering in truths), or a relation ("correspondence"). But philosophers should take something more nearly their own size to strain at. What needs discussing rather is the use, or certain uses, of the word "true." In vino, possibly, "veritas," but in a sober symposium "verum."

  J. L. Austin

  Truth, Eye, Past

  "Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society". "Truth" by J. L. Austin, "Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society", 1950.

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• The beginning of sense, not to say wisdom, is to realize that 'doing an action,' as used in philosophy, is a highly abstract expression--it is a stand-in used in the place of any (or almost any?) verb with a personal subject, in the same sort of way that 'thing' is a stand-in for anynoun substantive, and 'quality' a stand-in for the adjective.

  J. L. Austin

  Philosophy, Expression, Quality

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• I have always, privately and humbly, thought it a pity that so good a word [as culture] should go out of the best vocabularies; for when you lose an abstract term, you are apt to lose the thing it stands for.

  Katharine Fullerton Gerould

  Vocabulary, Culture, Pity

  Katharine Fullerton Gerould (1920). “Modes and Morals”

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• Each state of the human mind has some parable in the physical creation by which it is shadowed forth; nor is it only artists and poets, but even the most abstract thinkers that have drawn from this source. Lively activity we name fire; time is a stream that rolls on, sweeping all before it; eternity is a circle; a mystery is hid in midnight gloom, and truth dwells in the sun. Nay, I begin to believe that even the future destiny of the human race is prefigured in the dark oracular utterances of bodily creation.

  Friedrich Schiller

  Believe, Dark, Destiny

  Friedrich Schiller (1884). “Works”

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• Future lawyers should be more aware that law is not a system of abstract logic, but the web of arrangements, rooted in history but also in hopes, for promoting to a maximum the full use of a nation's resources and talents.

  Felix Frankfurter

  Law, Use, Logic

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• I love the abstract, delicate, profound, vague, voluptuously wordless sensation of living ecstatically.

  Anais Nin

  Profound, Delicate, Sensations

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• Facts are the mere dross of history. It is from the abstract truth which interpenetrates them, and lies latent among them, like gold in the ore, that the mass derives its whole value; and the precious particles are generally combined with the baser in such a manner that the separation is a task of the utmost difficulty.

  Thomas B. Macaulay

  Lying, History, Gold

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• Lawyers must pry into the recesses of the human heart, and become well acquainted with the whole moral world, that they may discover the abstract reason of all laws.

  Henry St John, 1st Viscount Bolingbroke

  Heart, Law, World

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• Though no participator in the joy of more vehement sport, I have a pleasure that I cannot reconcile to my abstract notions of the tenderness due to dumb creatures in the tranquil cruelty of angling. I can only palliate the wanton destructiveness of my amusement by trying to assure myself that my pleasure does not spring from the success of the treachery I practise toward a poor little fish, but rather from that innocent revelry in the luxuriance of summer life which only anglers enjoy to the utmost.

  Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton

  Summer, Sports, Spring

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• Because of his capacity for abstract communications and language and his ability to enter in imagination into the lives of others, man is able to build organizations of a size and complexity far beyond those of the lower animals.

  Kenneth E. Boulding

  Communication, Animal, Men

  "The Image: Knowledge in Life and Society". Book by Kenneth E. Boulding, 1956.

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• Constructions of a-rhythmical forms, the clash between concrete and abstract forms... ...The acute angle is passionate and dynamic, expressing will and a penetrating force.

  Carlo Carra

  Passionate, Construction, Form

  "Piani plastici come espanzione sferica nello spazio" (March 1913), as quoted in "Futurism," Didier Ottinger (ed.), p. 146, 2008.

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• Because there's just so much in a day now, I keep writing in much more abstract terms, like I don't try to write about what happened anymore. It would be impossible.

  Feist

  Writing, Trying, Would Be

  Interview with Seth Berkman, Stylus Magazine, December 20, 2005.

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• Know what your sin is and confess it; but do not imagine that you have approved yourself a penitent by confessing sin in the abstract.

  Theodore L. Cuyler

  Sin, Imagine, Penitence

  "Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers" by Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, (p. 449), 1895.

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• We value apology in the abstract, but turn our backs on it in practice.

  John Kador

  Apology, Practice, Turns

  John Kador (2009). “Effective Apology: Mending Fences, Building Bridges, and Restoring Trust”, p.5, Berrett-Koehler Publishers

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• Realism and Naturalism rely mostly on the eye of the flesh. Abstract, conceptual and surrealistic art rely mostly on the eye of the mind. Great works of art rely on the eye of contemplation, the eye of the spirit.

  Alex Grey

  Art, Eye, Mind

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