Abstraction Quotes - Page 3

• The bourgeoisie, which far surpasses the proletariat in the completeness and irreconcilibility of its class consciousness, is vitally interested in imposing its moral philosophy upon the exploited masses. It is exactly for this purpose that the concrete norms of the bourgeois catechism are concealed under moral abstractions...The appeal to abstract norms is not a disinterested philosophic mistake but a necessary element in the mechanics of class deception.

  Leon Trotsky

  Philosophy, Mistake, Class

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• I was not ready for abstraction. I clung to earth and her dear shapes, her density, her herbage, her juice. I wanted her volume, and I wanted to hear her throb.

  Emily Carr

  Density, Juice, Earth

  Emily Carr (2009). “Growing Pains: The Autobiography of Emily Carr”, p.313, D & M Publishers

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• Communism has served us ill in having us swap a living brotherhood for what looks to have the features of the coldest of all chill abstractions.

  Aime Cesaire

  Brotherhood, Looks, Chill

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• I understood what he was doing, that he had spent four years fulfilling the absurd and tedious duty of graduating from college and now he was emancipated from that world of abstraction, false security, parents, and material excess.

  Jon Krakauer

  College, Years, Parent

  "Into the Wild". Adventure, Biography, Drama, 2007.

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• ... I have developed, over the years, some sense of the difference between real horseshit that you can step in and Ideal Platonic Horseshit that exists, evidently, only in the contemplation of those who worship such abstractions; and I continue to notice that Natural Law bears an uncanny resemblance to ideal Platonic Horseshit.

  Robert Anton Wilson

  Real, Years, Law

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• Meditation is the use of symbols, not abstractions. A symbol is something alive. It is a hyphen between one reality and another.

  Frederick Lenz

  Buddhism, Reality, Meditation

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• Use no superfluous word, no adjective, which does not reveal something. Don't use such an expression as 'dim land of peace.' It dulls the image. It mixes an abstraction with the concrete. It comes from the writer's not realizing that the natural object is always the adequate symbol. Go in fear of abstraction.

  Ezra Pound

  Writing, Expression, Land

  Ernest Fenollosa, Ezra Pound (2009). “The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry: A Critical Edition”, p.9, Fordham Univ Press

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• We must not be frightened nor cajoled into accepting evil as deliverance from evil. We must go on struggling to be human, though monsters of abstractions police and threaten us.

  Robert Hayden

  Struggle, Evil, Political

  Robert Hayden (2013). “Collected Poems”, p.98, W. W. Norton & Company

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• The fundamental concepts of physical science, it is now understood, are abstractions, framed by our mind, so as to bring order to an apparent chaos of phenomena.

  William Cecil Dampier

  Science, Order, Mind

  William Cecil Dampier Dampier-Whetham M.A., F.R.S. (1931). “A History of Science and its Relations with Philosophy & Religion”

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• Life is filled with abstractions, and the only way to make heads or tails of it is going through intuition.

  David Lynch

  Heads Or Tails, Intuition, Way

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• I'd say that my profession ends where architectural thinking ends - architectural thinking in terms of thinking about programs and organizational structure. These abstractions play a role in many other disciplines, and those disciplines are now defining their 'architectures' as well.

  Rem Koolhaas

  Thinking, Play, Discipline

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• A bit of advice, don't copy nature too closely. Art is an abstraction; as you dream amid nature, extrapolate art from it, and concentrate on what you will create as a result.

  Paul Gauguin

  Dream, Art, Advice

  Paul Gauguin (1978). “The writings of a savage”, Viking Adult

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• The increased abstraction in mathematics that took place during the early part of this century was paralleled by a similar trend in the arts. In both cases, the increased level of abstraction demands greater effort on the part of anyone who wants to understand the work.

  Keith Devlin

  Art, Effort, Levels

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• Whether a photo or music, or a drawing or anything else I might do—it’s ultimately all an abstraction of my peculiar experience.

  William Eggleston

  Drawing, Peculiar, Might

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• As Enlightenment philosophers and scholars consciously adopted the methods of science to establish such abstract concepts as rights, liberty, and justice, successive generations have become schooled in thinking of these abstractions as applied to others in matrices-like mental rotations.

  Michael Shermer

  Thinking, Rights, Justice

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• Elegance is reduction, simplification, condensation. It is spare, stark, sleek. Elegance is cultivated abstraction. The source of Greek and Roman classicism - clarity, order, proportion, balance - is in Egypt.

  Camille Paglia

  Egypt, Order, Greek

  Camille Paglia (1990). “Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson”, Vintage

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• Become aware of internal, subjective, sub-verbal experiences, so that these experiences can be brought into the world of abstraction.

  Abraham Maslow

  Experience, World, Internals

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• Sometimes I start in a very realistic fashion, and as I go on from one painting to another of the same kind, it becomes simplified until it can be nothing but abstraction.

  Georgia O'Keeffe

  Fashion, Goes On, Painting

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• With greater completeness and abstraction, I have attained a form filtered to its essentials.

  Henri Matisse

  Simplicity, Essentials, Form

  Henri Matisse (2011). “Matisse: Drawing Life”, Queensland Art Gallery

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• The paradox in the evolution of French painting from Courbet to Cezanne is how it was brought to the verge of abstraction in and by its very effort to transcribe visual appearance with ever greater fidelity.

  Clement Greenberg

  Effort, Cezanne, Evolution

  "Art and Culture: Critical Essays". Book by Clement Greenberg, "On the Role of Nature in Modernist Painting" (1949), p. 171, 1961.

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• There is no interruption between my older paintings and my cutouts. Just that with an increasing sense of the absolute, and more abstraction, I have achieved a form that is simplified to its essence.

  Henri Matisse

  Essence, Painting, Form

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• Persons without education certainly do not want either acuteness or strength of mind in what concerns themselves, or in things immediately within their observation; but they have no power of abstraction, no general standard of taste, or scale of opinion. They see their objects always near, and never in the horizon. Hence arises that egotism which has been remarked as the characteristic of self-taught men.

  William Hazlitt

  Men, Self, Mind

  William Hazlitt (2015). “Delphi Collected Works of William Hazlitt (Illustrated)”, p.175, Delphi Classics

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• The only real life is the collective life of the race; individual life has no existence except as an abstraction.

  Auguste Comte

  Real, Race, Life Is

  Auguste Comte, John Henry Bridges (1865). “A General View of Positivism”, p.387, London, Trübner and Company

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• The love of fame is too high and delicate a feeling in the mind to be mixed up with realities, it is a solitary abstraction. * * * A name "fast anchored in the deep abyss of time" is like a star twinkling in the firmament, cold, silent, distant, but eternal and sublime; and our transmitting one to posterity is as if we should contemplate our translation to the skies.

  William Hazlitt

  Stars, Reality, Sky

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• ADMINISTRATION, n. An ingenious abstraction in politics, designed to receive the kicks and cuffs due to the premier or president. A man of straw, proof against bad-egging and dead-catting.

  Ambrose Bierce

  Men, President, Cuffs

  Ambrose Bierce (2016). “The Devil's Dictionary: The Devil World”, p.9, 谷月社

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