Abstraction Quotes

“The canvas is the door to another dimension. The paintbrush is the key.”
― Luhraw

“I wish to approach truth as closely as is possible, and therefore I abstract everything until I arrive at the fundamental quality of objects.”
― Piet Mondrian

“My mind seems to have become a kind of machine for grinding general laws out of large collections of facts, but why this should have caused the atrophy of that part of the brain alone, on which the higher tastes depend, I cannot conceive.”
― Charles Darwin

“The introduction of the digit 0 or the group concept was general nonsense too, and mathematics was more or less stagnating for thousands of years because nobody was around to take such childish steps...”
― Alexandre Grothendieck

“Form itself, even if completely abstract ... has its own inner sound.”
― Wassily Kandinsky

“Forgotten Stars. Time in the Flame.
Missing Shard. The Only Rain.
Door of the Memory. Waves in the Silk.
Silent Birch. Thoughts of Lunatics.
Secret of the Flowers. Soaring of the Souls.
Heart in the Night. And a Kiss Unfolds.
Forgotten Voyager. Voyage in the Words.
Nothing of the World. Someone of the Hemisphere.
Trembling Stones. Sucking Tears.
The Next Gift. The World in the Kisses.
Missing Angels. The Woman of the Girl.
Guardian of the Rings. Thorn in the Pearl.
Whispering Sword. Touching exclaim.
Soul in the Truth. Heat in the Flame.
Thy name, my name, Thy name!
Came. Became. To Remain.”
― Jasleen Kaur Gumber, Ginger and Honey

“Their view; it is cosmic. Not of a man here, a child there, but an abstraction: race, land. Volk. Land. Blut. Ehre. Not of honorable men but of Ehre itself, honor; the abstract is real, the actual is invisible to them. Die Güte, but not good men, this good man. It is their sense of space and time. They see through the here, the now, into the vast black deep beyond, the unchanging. And that is fatal to life. Because eventually there will be no life; there was once only the dust particles in space, the hot hydrogen gases, nothing more, and it will come again. This is an interval, ein Augenblick. The cosmic process is hurrying on, crushing life back into the granite and methane; the wheel turns for all life. It is all temporary. And they—these madmen—respond to the granite, the dust, the longing of the inanimate; they want to aid Natur.”
― Philip K. Dick, The Man in the High Castle

“She really was pretty, for a grown-up, but when you are seven, beauty is an abstraction, not an imperative.”
― Neil Gaiman, The Ocean at the End of the Lane

“All suffer and none should have to. But why not? If suffering makes life seem more real or more abstract, both circumstances are infinitely more bearable than the disturbing reality of mundane work-to-live-then-die-bored life.”
― Moonshine Noire

“The symbol is not a mere formality; it is the very essence of algebra. Without the symbol the object is a human perception and reflects all the phases under which the human senses grasp it; replaced by a symbol the object becomes a complete abstraction, a mere operand subject to certain indicated operations.”
― Tobias Dantzig, Number: The Language of Science

“In asking philosophical questions, we use a reason shaped by the body, a cognitive unconscious to which we have no direct access, and metaphorical thought of which we are largely unaware. The fact that abstract thought is mostly metaphorical means that answers to philosophical questions have always been, and always will be, mostly metaphorical. In itself, that is neither good nor bad. It is simply a fact about the capacities of the human mind. But it has major consequences for every aspect of philosophy. Metaphorical thought is the principal tool that makes philosophical insight possible and that constrains the forms that philosophy can take.”
― George Lakoff

“Monotheism and an absolute God define one another.

The absolute is a mental construct, an abstract mental model.
The absolute, whether it is a purest abstract essence or an extreme abstract measure, only exists in our minds as an abstraction.

Furthermore, the absolute will only lead to the abandon of all measure and blind us to the relative interdependence of all things.
The measure of knowledge of life is the knowledge of the measure of this relative interdependence.”
― Haroutioun Bochnakian, The Human Consensus and The Ultimate Project Of Humanity

“The world is too much for us. Rationality as we have come to know it works by ignoring most of experience: laws are arrived at by selective abstraction.”
― Tom Cheetham, Green Man, Earth Angel: The Prophetic Tradition and the Battle for the Soul of the World

“Both the destruction and the preservation of capitalism are meaningless slogans, but these slogans are supported by real organizations. Corresponding to each empty abstraction there is an actual human group, and any abstraction of which this is not true remains harmless.”
― simone weil, Simone Weil: An Anthology

“It is possible, indeed important, to be able to separate these two notions—to create procedures without naming them, and to give names to procedures that have already been created.”
― Harold Abelson, Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs

“Whenever the mind tries to ascend into realms of new and sublime abstraction, matter persists and confines it in the cellar of habit.”
― Juan Filloy, Op Oloop

“Some people are more interested in making good on a promise—rather than in doing what they promised.”
― Clifford Cohen

“Both [social science & science fiction] attempt to understand empirical facts and lived experience as something that is shaped by abstract - and not directly perceptible - structural forces.”
― Peter Frase, Four Futures: Life After Capitalism

“Similarities are read into nature by our nervous system, and so are structurally less fundamental than differences. Less fundamental, but no less important, as life and 'intelligence' would be totally impossible without abstracting. It becomes clear that the problem which has so excited the s.r. of the people of the United States of America and added so much to the merriment of mankind, 'Is the evolution a ''fact'' or a ''theory''?, is simply silly. Father and son are never identical - that surely is a structural 'fact' - so there is no need to worry about still higher abstractions, like 'man' and 'monkey'. That the fanatical and ignorant attack on the theory of evolution should have occured may be pathetic, but need concern us little, as such ignorant attacks are always liable to occur. But that biologists should offer 'defences' based on the confusions of orders of abstractiobs, and that 'philosophers' should have failed to see the simple dependence is rather sad. The problems of 'evolution' are verbal and have nothing to do with life as such, which is made up all through of different individuals, 'similarity' being structurally a manufactured article, produced by the nervous system of the observer.”
― Alfred Korzybski, Science and Sanity: An Introduction to Non-Aristotelian Systems and General Semantics

“Sabism is deabstraction, metacolorism, thematism, exotic, convalescent substrate, soft act, collectivism, pluralization, sensationalism, pluralart, thematic colourism, reabstraction.”
― Lepota L. Cosmo

“You have to be taught to recognize and care about differences, you have to be instructed who you really are; you have to learn how generations of dead people and their incomprehensible accomplishments made you the way you are; you have to define your loyalty to an abstraction-based herd that transcends your individuality.”
― Aleksandar Hemon, The Book of My Lives

“We shall understand the mode of purification by confession, and that of contemplation by analysis, advancing by analysis to the first notion, beginning with the properties underlying it; abstracting from the body its physical properties, taking away the dimension of depth, then that of breadth, and then that of length. For the point which remains is a unit, so to speak, having position; from which if we abstract position, there is the conception of unity.”
― Clement of Alexandria, Volume 12. The Writings of Clement of Alexandria

“People’s goodness or badness exists within not them but our minds.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“Today we demand justice for the oppressed. We no longer accept atrocities as the inescapable fate of the defenceless. We desire and expect a better future. But when confronted with the enormity of injustice and what it demands of us, we retreat into the familiar ritual of intellectualization and moral posturing, recycling lofty liberal ideals from a safe distance. We avoid the intimate knowledge of suffering without which we will never understand the imperative of human rights.”
― Payam Akhavan, In Search of A Better World: A Human Rights Odyssey

“Challenge quandary thinking, either/or thinking come by moving from the abstract to the concrete. What can we do with the choice actually in front of us?”
― Sherry Turkle, Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other

“... Lyotard suggests that while discourse operates as a system of representation which defines meanings according to their relation to other concepts in that system, figure is the realm of the singular, of that which refuses to, or simply cannot, be captured and systematized by the concept.”
― Nicholas Gane, Max Weber and Postmodern Theory: Rationalisation Versus Re-enchantment

“Many were incarcerated with the aberrant prosaic possibilities of ataraxia. Only the mentally sensitive few were cognizant of the nuisance to serenity and an actuality that lacked a balance betwixt havoc and sangfroid. The intellectual capabilities of the excellent idiosyncratic talents of a man with an agog outlook for de minimis fringe entities had left the portal ajar for the enlightened few, to get a glimpse of the obsecure reality that most had decided to claim socratic ignorance to evade inquiries.”
― O.Z. Napaeae

“The paradox of illuminating complexity is that it is inherently difficult to do so without erasing all of the nuance.”
― David Shenk, The Immortal Game: A History of Chess, or How 32 Carved Pieces on a Board Illuminated Our Understanding of War, Art, Science and the Human Brain

“[I]t is important to underscore Kant’s basic point that the finitude of the human condition implies a life-long need for concrete moral examples and personal exemplars. With his second argument in defence of examples, we are no longer talking about a strategy of moral education that is to be applied only to children and that can be dispensed with once they reach adulthood. Adult human beings do have stronger powers of reflection and abstraction than do children. But even adults remain saddled with ‘a discursive image-dependent understanding’, and thus they will always need examples in order to make the law visible to themselves.”
― Robert B. Louden

“You see, the notion of "sin" is for me an abstraction. There's no such thing as "sin". There's only such a thing as "tactlessness".”
― Mihail Sebastian, For Two Thousand Years