Abstraction Quotes - Page 4

• I like residing in abstraction.

  Sufjan Stevens

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• Don't get stuck on the level of words. A word is no more than a means to an end. It's an abstraction. Not unlike a signpost, it points beyond itself

  Eckhart Tolle

  Mean, Levels, Power Of Now

  Eckhart Tolle (2010). “The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment”, p.108, New World Library

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• The physicist who states a law of nature with the aid of a mathematical formula is abstracting a real feature of a real material world, even if he has to speak of numbers, vectors, tensors, state-functions, or whatever to make the abstraction.

  Hilary Putnam

  Real, Numbers, Law

  Hilary Putnam (1979). “Philosophical Papers: Volume 1, Mathematics, Matter and Method”, p.60, Cambridge University Press

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• At that point it certainly would be called abstract. That is to say, you had a model and there'd be one or two or three people there drawing the model but otherwise you had abstractions all around the room, even though the model was in front of you.

  Lee Krasner

  Two, Drawing, People

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• My message to the serious programmer is this: spend a part of your working day examining and refining your own methods. Even though programmers are always struggling to meet some future or past deadline, methodological abstraction is a wise long term investment.

  Robert W. Floyd

  Wise, Struggle, Past

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• The truth I've discovered is that you don't have to lift enormous weights to grow muscle. By using stricter form, slower negatives, and stretching between sets you can get an incredible pump in all your workouts. Numbers are an abstraction, especially to muscles. Your body doesn't know the absolute weight of what you lift, it only recognizes how heavy it feels. The secret is to make lighter weights feel heavier.

  Frank Zane

  Workout, Numbers, Secret

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• Far be it for me to have worked it out in any abstract way. I don't know why the bull and Mrs. May have to die, or why Mr. Fortune and Mary Fortune: I just feel in my bones that that is the way it has to be. If I had the abstraction first I don't suppose I would write the story.

  Flannery O'Connor

  Writing, Empathy, Apathy

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• The misery of other people is only an abstraction something that can be sympathized with only by drawing from one's own experiences. But as it stands, true empathy remains impossible. And so long as it is, people will continue to suffer the pressure of their seemingly singular existence.

  Nicole Krauss

  Drawing, Long, People

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• Cruelty...prefers abstraction. Some have tried to resolved this gap by hunting or butchering an animal themselves, as if those experiences might somehow legitimize the endeavor of eating animals. This is very silly. Murdering someone would surely prove that you are capable of killing, but it woudln't be the most reasonable way to understand why you should or shouldn't do it.

  Jonathan Safran Foer

  Silly, Animal, Hunting

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• Hideous psychic fallout they'd all endured both in active marijuana-dependency and then in marijuana-detox: the social isolation, anxious lassitude, and the hyperself-consciousness that then reinforced the withdrawal and anxiety - the increasing emotional abstraction, poverty of affect, and then total emotional catalepsy - the obsessive analyzing, finally the paralytic stasis that results from obsessive analysis of all possible implications of both getting up from the couch and not getting up from the couch.

  David Foster Wallace

  Marijuana, Emotional, Psychics

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• Abstract liberty, like other mere abstractions, is not to be found.

  Edmund Burke

  Liberty, Abstract, Found

  Speech 'On Conciliation with America' 22 March 1775

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• Money is becoming increasingly plastic and digital. If there is a major disaster, let's say an asteroid strike, we'll go back to trading meats and furs. We won't need an abstraction, a dollar bill, but real tangible goods to survive.

  Kabir Sehgal

  Real, Asteroids, Digital

  Source: bobmorris.biz

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• The individual is the true reality of life. A cosmos in himself, he does not exist for the State, nor for that abstraction called "society," or the "nation," which is only a collection of individuals.

  Emma Goldman

  Reality, Liberty, Doe

  Emma Goldman (1998). “Red Emma Speaks: An Emma Goldman Reader”

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• Do not copy nature too much. Art is an abstraction.

  Paul Gauguin

  Art, Too Much, Copies

  Paul Gauguin, Robert John Goldwater (1972). “Paul Gauguin”, Harry N Abrams Inc

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• New York... is a city of geometric heights, a petrified desert of grids and lattices, an inferno of greenish abstraction under a flat sky, a real Metropolis from which man is absent by his very accumulation.

  Roland Barthes

  New York, Real, Men

  Roland Barthes, Susan Sontag (1983). “Barthes: Selected Writings”

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• Of the many forms of false culture, a premature converse with abstractions is perhaps the most likely to prove fatal to the growth of a masculine vigour of intellect.

  George Boole

  Science, Growth, Culture

  George Boole (1872). “A Treatise on Differential Equations”, p.6

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• It is astonishing that so simple a truth should ever have had an adversary; and it is one among a multitude of proofs, how apt a spirit of ill-informed jealousy, or of too great abstraction and refinement is to lead men astray from the plainest paths of reason and conviction.

  Alexander Hamilton

  Simple, Men, Path

  Alexander Hamilton (1831). “The Federalist on the New Constitution, Written in the Year 1788, with an Appendix Containing the Letters of Pacificus and Helvidius on the Proclamation of Neutrality of 1793”, p.58

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• We lay down a fundamental principle of generalization by abstraction: The existence of analogies between central features of various theories implies the existence of a general theory which underlies the particular theories and unifies them with respect to those central features.

  E. H. Moore

  Math, Science, Analogies

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• The field of scientific abstraction encompasses independent kingdoms of ideas and of experiments and within these, rulers whose fame outlasts the centuries. But they are not the only kings in science. He also is a king who guides the spirit of his contemporaries by knowledge and creative work, by teaching and research in the field of applied science, and who conquers for science provinces which have only been raided by craftsmen.

  Fritz Haber

  Kings, Teaching, Creativity

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• Abstraction is an esoteric language.

  Eric Fischl

  Esoteric, Painting, Language

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• The beginning of human knowledge is through the senses, and the fiction writer begins where the human perception begins. He appeals through the senses, and you cannot appeal through the senses with abstractions.

  Flannery O'Connor

  Perception, Fiction, Crafts

  Flannery O'Connor (1969). “Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose”, p.67, Macmillan

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• From where I sit, battles are hard. I’ve written my share. Sometimes I employ the private’s viewpoint, very up close and personal, dropping the reader right into the middle of the carnage. That’s vivid and visceral, but of necessity chaotic, and it is easy to lose all sense of the battle as a whole. Sometimes I go with the general’s point of view instead, looking down from on high, seeing lines and flanks and reserves. That gives a great sense of the tactics, of how the battle is won or lost, but can easily slide into abstraction.

  George R. R. Martin

  Writing, Views, Giving

  Interview with Bernard Cornwell, www.bernardcornwell.net.

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• To be well used, creatures and places must be used sympathetically, just as they must be known sympathetically to be well known...The "animal scientist" to whom it is of no concern whether or not animals suffer will almost inevitably aid and abet the destruction of the decent old ideal of animal husbandry and, as a consequence, increase the suffering of animals. I hope that my country may be delivered from the remote, cold abstractions of university science.

  Wendell Berry

  Country, Animal, Pet

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• The beauty of physics lies in the extent which seemingly complex and unrelated phenomena can be explained and correlated through a high level of abstraction by a set of laws which are amazing in their simplicity.

  Melvin Schwartz

  Lying, Science, Law

  Melvin Schwartz (2012). “Principles of Electrodynamics”, p.105, Courier Corporation

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• All forms of beauty, like all possible phenomena, contain an element of the eternal and an element of the transitory - of the absolute and of the particular. Absolute and eternal beauty does not exist, or rather it is only an abstraction creamed from the general surface of different beauties. The particular element in each manifestation comes from the emotions: and just as we have our own particular emotions, so we have our own beauty.

  Charles Baudelaire

  Beauty, Justice, Doe

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