Abstraction Quotes - Page 14

• What the churches are peddling is high abstraction, and you really have to work yourself up into a lather to be able to accept that as worthy of that kind of attention. The psychedelic subset of society is into an experience, and it's accessible.

  Terence McKenna

  Church, Attention, Able

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• Hierarchy is a kind of order of abstractions.

  Grady Booch

  Order, Hierarchy, Kind

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• I am fully and entirely concentrated on the board. I never even consider my opponent's personality. So far as I am concerned, my opponent might as well be an abstraction or an automaton.

  Wilhelm Steinitz

  Personality, Opponents, Might

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• The true God is not a form idealized; he/she/it is real and therefore, by definition, imperfect; only an abstraction can be free of flaws. And since God is imperfect, there will be suffering.... There is no perfect God. And your suffering requires no more explanation than that unavoidable imperfection.

  Robert J. Sawyer

  Real, Perfect, Suffering

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• The attempt to regulate relations between people too closely, by means of the law, in the name of an abstraction such as equality, leads to both absurdity and cruelty. The British are fast turning themselves into a nation of slaves, where even the slave-masters are not free.

  Anthony Daniels

  Mean, Law, Names

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• It is easy now to communicate with people through abstraction, and particularly so in sculpture. Since the whole body reacts to its presence, people become themselves a living part of the whole.

  Barbara Hepworth

  People, Sculpture, Body

  Interview in The Studio, 1962.

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• We are concerned with similar states of consciousness and relationship to the world.. ..If previous abstractions paralleled the scientific and objective preoccupations of our times, ours are finding a pictoral equivalent for man's new knowledge and consciousness of his more complex inner self.

  Mark Rothko

  Men, Self, World

  Mark Rothko, Miguel López-Remiro (2006). “Writings on Art”, p.46, Yale University Press

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• Nothing so tires a person as having to struggle, not with himself, but with an abstraction.

  Jose Saramago

  Struggle, Tire, Persons

  "All the Names" by Jose Saramago, tr. Margaret Jull Costam London: The Harvill Press, (p. 14), 1999.

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• What I actually admire in Perl is its ability to provide a very successful abstraction of the horrible mess that is collectively called Unix.

  Erik Naggum

  Successful, Unix, Admire

  "Using Lisp to Call another program in linux?". Usenet discussion groups, groups.google.com. November 11, 2002.

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• 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.

  Marsden Hartley

  Perfect, Landscape, Realistic

  "Marsden Hartley" by Gail R. Scott, Abbeville Publishers, Cross River Press, New York (p. 68), 1988.

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• We have tried to fit man into abstraction, but he does not fit.

  Mark Tobey

  Men, Doe, Fit

  Bahai lecture, New York; as quoted in "Abstract Expressionist Painting in America", W.C. Seitz, 1983, p. 104, October 30, 1951.

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• Amid the welter of vague political abstractions ... where meanings shift so quickly and so subtly, not only following changes of thought, but often manipulated artificially by political practitioners so as to obscure, expand, or distort ... a certain broad consistency in its relations to other kindred terms is the nearest approach to definition which such a term as Imperialism admits. Nationalism, internationalism, colonialism, its three closest congeners, are equally elusive, equally shifty, and the changeful overlapping of all four demands the closest vigilance.

  J. Allan Hobson

  Political, Consistency, Definitions

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• Everything abstract is ultimately part of the concrete. Everything inanimate finally serves the living. That is why every activity dealing in abstraction stands in ultimate service to a living whole.

  Edith Stein

  Unity, Abstract, Concrete

  Edith Stein (2012). “Edith Stein Essays on Woman”, p.11, ICS Publications

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• The endeavor of scientific research to see events in their more general connection in order to determine their laws, is a legitimate and useful occupation. Any protest against such efforts, in the name of freefom from restrictive conditions, would be fruitless if science did not naïvely identify the abstractions called rules and laws with the actually efficacious forces, and confuse the probability that B will follow A with the actual effort make B follow A.

  Max Horkheimer

  Order, Law, Names

  "Critical Theory: Selected Essays" by Max Horkheimer, (p. 150), 1982.

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• Behind the abstraction known as 'the markets' lurks a set of institutions designed to maximize the wealth and power of the most privileged group of people in the world, the creditor-rentier class of the First World and their junior partners in the Third.

  Doug Henwood

  Class, People, Groups

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• It is not difficult to conceive, however, that for many reasons a man writes much better than he lives. For without entering into refined speculations, it may be shown much easier to design than to perform. A man proposes his schemes of life in a state of abstraction and disengagement, exempt from the enticements of hope, the solicitations of affection, the importunities of appetite, or the depressions of fear.

  Samuel Johnson

  Writing, Men, Design

  Samuel Johnson, Elizabeth Carter, Samuel Richardson, Catherine Talbot (1825). “The Rambler: A Periodical Paper, Published in 1750, 1751, 1752”, p.25

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• The pursuit of truth is just a polite name for the intellectual's favorite pastime of substituting simple and therefore false abstractions for the living complexities of reality.

  Aldous Huxley

  Art, Philosophy, Simple

  Aldous Huxley (1954). “The Collected Works of Aldous Huxley: Point counter point”

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• I submit that tennis is the most beautiful sport there is, and also the most demanding....Basketball comes close, but it's a team sport and lacks tennis's primal mano a mano intensity. Boxing might come close- at least at the lighter weight divisions- but the actual physical damage the fighters inflict on each other makes it too concretely brutal to be really beautiful- a level of abstraction and formality (i.e., play) is necessary for a sport to possess true metaphysical beauty (in my opinion).

  David Foster Wallace

  Basketball, Beautiful, Sports

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• Abstraction didn't have to be limited to a kind of rectilinear geometry or even a simple curve geometry. It could have a geometry that had a narrative impact. In other words, you could tell a story with the shapes. It wouldn't be a literal story, but the shapes and the interaction of the shapes and colors would give you a narrative sense. You could have a sense of an abstract piece flowing along and being part of an action or activity. That sort of turned me on.

  Frank Stella

  Simple, Impact, Curves

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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• I paint - I tend more to abstraction - but not as much as I would like to because of time. I would love to do sculpture - I've toyed with the idea of fitting in a sculpture course.

  Lily Cole

  Ideas, Sculpture, Paint

  "Biography/ Personal Quotes". www.imdb.com.

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• Music mirrors where we should go, have gone and can go. Music is an abstraction.

  Max Roach

  Mirrors, Gone, Should

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• Nature I believe in. True art aims to, represent men and women, not as my little self would have them, but as they appear. My heroes and heroines I want not extreme types, all good or all bad; but human, mortal--partly good, partly bad. Realism I need. Pure mental abstractions have no significance for me.

  Ouida

  Art, Hero, Believe

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• Whether dark presages of the night proceed from any latent power of the soul during her abstraction, or from any operation of subordinate spirits, has been a dispute.

  Joseph Addison

  Dark, Night, Soul

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• A great man la an abstraction of some one excellence; but whoever fancies himself an abstraction of excellence, so far from being great, may be sure that he is a blockhead, equally ignorant of excellence or defect of himself or others.

  William Hazlitt

  Men, Ignorant, Excellence

  William Hazlitt (2005). “The Fight and Other Writings”, p.464, Penguin UK

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• Light is snow sifted / To an abstraction.

  May Sarton

  Light, Snow

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