Abstract Quotes - Page 32

• The scripture notion of truth is not an abstract, static, and timeless formula, but is something that comes true in time as the fulfillment of a divine promise. Truth happens in history.

  Peter Kreeft

  Truth, Promise, Scripture

  Peter Kreeft (1992). “Back to Virtue: Traditional Moral Wisdom for Modern Moral Confusion”, p.75, Ignatius Press

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• One might suppose that reality must be held to at all costs. However, though that may be the moral thing to do, it is not necessarily the most useful thing to do. The Greeks themselves chose the ideal over the real in their geometry and demonstrated very well that far more could be achieved by consideration of abstract line and form than by a study of the real lines and forms of the world; the greater understanding achieved through abstraction could be applied most usefully to the very reality that was ignored in the process of gaining knowledge.

  Isaac Asimov

  Real, Math, Understanding

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• The concept of 'talent' is formed under completely abstract criteria, having nothing in common with reality. But the reality is such that I don't understand chess as a whole. But then again no one understands chess in its entirety. Perhaps talent is something else, in chess it is conditionality.

  Alexander Morozevich

  Reality, Practice, Chess

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• I came in with a healthy skepticism about these programs. My team evaluated them. We scrubbed them thoroughly. We actually expanded some of the oversight, increased some of the safeguards. But my assessment, and my team's assessment was that they help us prevent terrorist attacks. In the abstract, you can complain about 'Big Brother' and how this is a potential program run amok. But when you actually look at the details, then, I think we've struck the right balance.

  Barack Obama

  Running, Brother, Team

  Obama's Remarks on Health Care and Surveillance, www.nytimes.com. June 7, 2013.

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• Experience has proved that there is no difference between a so-called realist painting - of a landscape, for example - and an abstract painting. They both have more or less the same effect on the observer.

  Gerhard Richter

  Differences, Abstract Painting, Example

  FaceBook post by Gerhard Richter from Oct 28, 2015

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• Ivan Ilych saw that he was dying, and he was in continual despair. In the depth of his heart he knew he was dying, but not only was he not accustomed to the thought, he simply did not and could not grasp it. The syllogism he had learnt from Kiesewetter's Logic: "Caius is a man, men are mortal, therefore Caius is mortal," had always seemed to him correct as applied to Caius, but certainly not as applied to himself. That Caius - man in the abstract - was mortal, was perfectly correct, but he was not Caius, not an abstract man, but a creature quite, quite separate from all others.

  Leo Tolstoy

  Heart, Men, Dying

  Leo Tolstoy (2010). “The Death of Ivan Ilych: English-Russian Parallel Text Edition”, p.70, Lulu.com

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• ...the materialism of modern civilization is paradoxically founded on a hatred of materiality, a goal-oriented desire to obliterate all natural limits through technology, imposing an abstract grid over nature.

  Alan Watts

  Technology, Civilization, Goal

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• 'Environment' is not an abstract concern, or simply a matter of aesthetics, or of personal taste - although it can and should involve these as well. Man is shaped to a great extent by his surroundings. Our physical nature, our mental health, our culture and institutions, our opportunities for challenge and fulfillment, our very survival - all of these are directly related to and affected by the environment in which we live. They depend upon the continued healthy functioning of the natural systems of the Earth.

  Richard M. Nixon

  Men, Opportunity, Challenges

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• An abstract painting need in 50 years by no means look "abstract" any longer.

  Marcel Duchamp

  Art, Mean, Years

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• With God thoughts are colors, with us they are pigments-even the most abstract one may be accompanied by physical pain.

  Georg C. Lichtenberg

  Pain, Color, May

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• Write a paper promising salvation, make it a "structured" something or a "virtual" something, or "abstract," "distributed" or "higher-order" or "applicative" and you can almost be certain of having started a new cult.

  Edsger Dijkstra

  Writing, Order, Paper

  "My hopes of computing science" by Edsger Dijkstra, www.cs.utexas.edu. April 1979.

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• Good writing, and this is especially important in a subject such as economics, must also involve the reader in the matter at hand. It is not enough to explain. The images that are in the mind of the writer must be made to reappear in the mind of the reader, and it is the absence of this ability that causes much economic writing to be condemned, quite properly, as abstract.

  John Kenneth Galbraith

  Writing, Hands, Mind

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• For centuries, we in the West have thought of ourselves as rational animals whose mental capacities transcend our bodily nature. In this traditional view our minds are abstract, logical, unemotionally rational, consciously accessible, and, above all, able to directly fit and represent the world. Language has a special place in thie view of what a human is - it is a privileged, logical symbol system internal to our minds that transparently expresses abstract concepts that are defined in terms of the external world itself.

  George Lakoff

  Animal, Views, Mind

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• I feel it's just some sort of game if it's just abstract.

  Jeffrey Smart

  Art, Games, Feels

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• When we tell our own story, we teach the values that our choices reveal, not as abstract principals, but as our lived experience. We reveal the kind of person we are to the extent that we let others identify with us.

  Marshall Ganz

  Inspirational, Kindness, Choices

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• All paintings start out of a mood, out of a relationship with things or people, out of a complete visual impression. To call this expression abstract seems to me often to confuse the issue. Abstract means literally to draw from or separate. In this sense every artist is abstract . . . a realistic or non-objective approach makes no difference. The result is what counts.

  Richard Diebenkorn

  Mean, Artist, Expression

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• With an abstract idea it is possible to enter into a relation of formal knowledge, to become enthusiastic about it, and perhaps even to put it into practice; but it can never be followed in personal obedience. Christianity without the living Christ is inevitably Christianity without discipleship, and Christianity without discipleship is always Christianity without Christ.

  Dietrich Bonhoeffer

  Practice, Ideas, Christianity

  Dietrich Bonhoeffer (2015). “The Cost of Discipleship”, p.17, SCM Press

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• But harmony is limitation. Thus rightness of limitation is essential for growth of reality. Unlimited possibility and abstract creativity can procure nothing.

  Alfred North Whitehead

  Creativity, Reality, Growth

  Alfred North Whitehead (2011). “Religion in the Making”, p.137, Cambridge University Press

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• Money alone is absolutely good, because it is not only a concrete satisfaction of one need in particular; it is an abstract satisfaction of all.

  Arthur Schopenhauer

  Needs, Satisfaction, Concrete

  Arthur Schopenhauer (2016). “The Wisdom of Life”, p.33, Cosimo Classics

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• The overscaled compositions being produced by so many abstract painters, which are full of movement and use of color, are ideal example, ideal transformations of an entire wall and entire room.... There is no denying that one of the major attractions of these successful large compositions is their structural decorative use in the contemporary scene... That these large canvases can be superbly decorative may not be considered complimentary by some of the artists involved.

  Van Day Truex

  Wall, Successful, Artist

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• How many people become abstract as a way of appearing profound.

  Joseph Joubert

  People, Profound, Way

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• Abstract words are ancient coins whose concrete images in the give and take of talk have worn away with use.

  Julian Jaynes

  Giving, Use, Coins

  Julian Jaynes (2000). “The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind”, p.61, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• I think most people, when they think about the Black Panther Party, they think in very abstract, caricatured terms. They think about black fists in the air, but they don't think about the actual people, and the families, and the relationships.

  Kerry Washington

  Party, Thinking, Air

  "Kerry Washington" by Sam Adams, www.avclub.com. December 09, 2010.

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• Black and White is essentially an abstract way to interpret and transform what one might refer to as reality. My purpose in taking photographs over the past forty years has ultimately been about defining myself. It has been fundamentally a psychological and existential journey.

  Roger Ballen

  Black And White, Past, Journey

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• Existentialism does not offer to the reader the consolations of an abstract evasion: existentialism proposes no evasion. On the contrary, its ethics is experienced in the truth of life, and it then appears as the only proposition of salvation which one can address to men.

  Simone de Beauvoir

  Men, Doe, Addresses

  Martin Heidegger, Simone de Beauvoir, Jean-Paul Sartre (2016). “The Philosophical Library Existentialism Collection: Essays in Metaphysics, The Ethics of Ambiguity, and The Philosophy of Existentialism”, p.134, Open Road Media

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