Abstraction Quotes - Page 18

• I care about strangers when they're abstractions, but I feel almost nothing when they're literally in front of me.

  Chuck Klosterman

  Care, Stranger, Feels

  Chuck Klosterman (2014). “I Wear the Black Hat: Grappling with Villains (Real and Imagined)”, p.2, Simon and Schuster

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• We did not adopt socialism out of books, abstractions, humanism, or pity, but rather out of need for the Arab working class is the mover of history in this period.

  Michel Aflaq

  Book, Class, Needs

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• Abstraction allows man to see with his mind what he cannot see physically with his eyes.

  Arshile Gorky

  Eye, Men, Mind

  Arshile Gorky (2005). “Նամակներ”

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• Music, first of all, is completely about abstraction, which is exactly what architecture is not. In a way, it has been incredibly constructive to know what true abstraction is. So you dont fall into the trap of thinking that what you do is abstract.

  Rafael Vinoly

  Fall, Thinking, Way

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• The career of a young theoretical physicist consists of treating the harmonic oscillator in ever-increasing levels of abstraction.

  Sidney Coleman

  Careers, Levels, Young

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• Science is a little bit more than a wonderful way of modelling and predicting; its a wonderful technical abstraction. I think science is a really wonderful technical abstraction.

  Bernard Beckett

  Thinking, Littles, Way

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• All non-trivial abstractions, to some degree, are leaky.

  Joel Spolsky

  Degrees

  Joel Spolsky (2004). “Joel on Software”, p.199, Apress

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• Mankind? That is an abstraction. There have always been and always will be only individuals.

  Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

  Individual, Mankind

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• When Philosophy with its abstractions paints grey in grey, the freshness and life of youth has gone, the reconciliation is not a reconciliation in the actual, but in the ideal world.

  Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

  Philosophy, Philosophical, Gone

  Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Jesse Glenn Gray (1997). “On Art, Religion, and the History of Philosophy: Introductory Lectures”, p.258, Hackett Publishing

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• When needs and means become abstract in quality, abstraction is also a character of the reciprocal relation of individuals to oneanother. This abstract character, universality, is the character of being recognized and is the moment which makes concrete, i.e. social, the isolated and abstract needs and their ways and means of satisfaction.

  Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

  Character, Mean, Quality

  Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1945). “Hegel's Philosophy of right”

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• Essential truth, the truth of the intellectualists, the truth with no one thinking it, is like the coat that fits tho no one has ever tried it on, like the music that no ear has listened to. It is less real, not more real, than the verified article; and to attribute a superior degree of glory to it seems little more than a piece of perverse abstraction-worship.

  William James

  Truth, Real, Thinking

  William James (2015). “The Meaning of Truth: Human Understanding”, p.78, 谷月社

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• Denotation by means of sounds and markings is a remarkable abstraction. Three letters designate God for me; several lines a million things. How easy becomes the manipulation of the universe here, how evident the concentration of the intellectual world! Language is the dynamics of the spiritual realm. One word of command moves armies; the word liberty entire nations.

  Novalis

  God, Spiritual, Moving

  "Pollen and Fragments". Book by Novalis. Fragment No. 2, 1798.

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• But the nature of our civilized minds is so detached from the senses, even in the vulgar, by abstractions corresponding to all theabstract terms our languages abound in, and so refined by the art of writing, and as it were spiritualized by the use of numbers, because even the vulgar know how to count and reckon, that it is naturally beyond our power to form the vast image of this mistress called "Sympathetic Nature.

  Giambattista Vico

  Art, Writing, Numbers

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• The possible truths, hazily perceived in the world of abstraction, like those inferred from observation and experiment in the world of matter, are forced upon the profane multitudes, too busy to think for themselves, under the form of Divine revelation and scientific authority. But the same question stands open from the days of Socrates and Pilate down to our own age of wholesale negation: is there such a thing as absolute truth in the hands of any one party or man?

  H. P. Blavatsky

  Spiritual, Party, Men

  Lucifer Magazine, February 1888.

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• The world expects of Christians that they will raise their voices so loudly and clearly and so formulate their protest that not even the simplest man can have the slightest doubt about what they are saying. Further, the world expects of Christians that they will eschew all fuzzy abstractions and plant themselves squarely in front of the bloody face of history. We stand in need of folk who have determined to speak directly and unmistakably and come what may, to stand by what they have said.

  Albert Camus

  Christian, Religious, Men

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• I felt like my parents were always involved with abstraction, and I wanted to do something very specific.

  Lena Dunham

  Parent, Wanted, Felt

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• I'm not a person who writes really abstract things with oblique references. I look at abstraction like I look at condiments. Give me some Tabasco sauce, some ketchup, some mayonnaise. I love all of that. Put it on a trumpet. I've just got to have the ketchup and Tabasco sauce. That's my attitude about musical philosophy.

  Wynton Marsalis

  Attitude, Philosophy, Writing

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• We are so much the victims of abstraction that with the Earth in flames we can barely rouse ourselves to wander across the room and look at the thermostat.

  Terence McKenna

  Flames, Mind Blowing, Looks

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• Willem de Kooning is generally credited for coming out of the painterly gates strong in the forties, revolutionizing art and abstraction and reaching incredible heights by the early fifties, and then tailing off.

  Jerry Saltz

  Art, Strong, Height

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

  Robert Smithson

  Zero, Artist

  Robert Smithson, Jack D. Flam (1996). “Robert Smithson, the Collected Writings”, p.42, Univ of California Press

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• Washington isn't a city, it's an abstraction.

  Dylan Thomas

  Cities

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• To make someone an icon is to make him an abstraction, and abstractions are incapable of vital communication with living people.

  David Foster Wallace

  Communication, Icons, People

  David Foster Wallace (2005). “Consider the Lobster: And Other Essays”, p.157, Hachette UK

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• Developing Christlike attributes in our lives is not an easy task, especially when we move away from generalities and abstractions and begin to deal with real life. The test comes in practicing what we proclaim. The reality check comes when Christlike attributes need to become visible in our lives—as husband or wife, as father or mother, as son or daughter, in our friendships, in our employment, in our business, and in our recreation. We can recognize our growth, as can those around us, as we gradually increase our capacity to 'act in all holiness before [Him]' (D&C 43:9).

  Dieter F. Uchtdorf

  Daughter, Mother, Husband

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• The philosopher Elaine Scarry has observed that "beauty always takes place in the particular." Cruelty, on the other hand, prefers abstraction.

  Jonathan Safran Foer

  Hands, Philosopher, Cruelty

  "Eating Animals". Book by Jonathan Safran Foer, 2010.

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• I could not bear the deep freeze settling around my bones at the thought that yet another attempt to get out of my life alive would end in disappointment. Time became palpable and viscous. Every minute, every second, every nanosecond, wrapped around my spine so that my nerves tightened and ached. I faded into abstraction. A self-generated narcosis created a painful blank where my mind used to be.

  Elizabeth Wurtzel

  Disappointment, Self, Mind

  Elizabeth Wurtzel (2014). “Prozac Nation: Young and Depressed in America”, p.111, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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