Abstraction Quotes

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Quotes About Abstraction

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Suppose that you want to teach the 'cat' concept to a very young child. Do you explain that a cat is a relatively small, primarily carnivorous mammal with retractible claws, a distinctive sonic output, etc.? I'll bet not. You probably show the kid a lot of different cats, saying 'kitty' each time, until it gets the idea. To put it more generally, generalizations are best made by abstraction from experience. ~ Ralph P. Boas, Jr.
Abstraction quotes by Ralph P. Boas, Jr.
…it is far too simplistic to claim that the specter of this self-engendering monster pursuing its ends regardless of any human or environmental concern is an ideological abstraction, and to insist that one should never forget that, behind this abstraction, lie real people and natural objects on whose productive capacities and resources capital's circulation is based and on which it feeds like a gigantic parasite. (…) the fate of whole swathes of society and sometimes of whole countries can be decided by the speculative dance of Capital, which pursues its goal of profitability with a blessed indifference to how its movements will affect social reality. Therein resides the fundamental systemic violence of capitalism, (…) its violence is no longer attributable to concrete individuals with their "evil" intentions, but is purely "objective", systemic, anonymous - quite literally a conceptual violence, the violence of a Concept whose self-deployment rules and regulates social reality. ~ Slavoj Zizek
Abstraction quotes by Slavoj Zizek
I have always loved contemporary dance, but it has always been a bit of a mystery to me. But choreography is very much like what I do when you are putting characters in frame on the page. It's so impressive what they do with their bodies. It's like painting: an abstraction. ~ Michael Leunig
Abstraction quotes by Michael Leunig
The Occupied Territories; you think there is absolutely no way you can get to it. Do you see how close it is? How touchable? How real?

When the eye sees it, it has all the clarify of earth and pebbles and hills and rocks. It has its colours and its temperatures and its wild plants too.

Who would dare to make it into an abstraction now that it has declared its physical self to the senses?

It is no longer 'the beloved' in the poetry of resistance, or an item on a political party program, and it is not an argument or a metaphor. It stretches before me, as touchable as a scorpion, a bird, a well; visible as a field of chalk, as the prints of shoes.

I asked myself, what is so special about it except that we have lost it? It is a land, like any land.

We sing for it only so that we may remember the humiliation of having had it taken from us. Our song is not for some sacred thing of the past but for our current self-respect that is violated anew every day by the Occupation. ~ Mourid Barghouti
Abstraction quotes by Mourid Barghouti
We have tried to fit man into abstraction, but he does not fit. ~ Mark Tobey
Abstraction quotes by Mark Tobey
Any community that remains an abstraction is an easy target for prejudice and cruelty, but any community that becomes fully humanized is much harder to treat in that way. ~ Andrew Solomon
Abstraction quotes by Andrew Solomon
If I see a human body on the stage, I don't see it as an abstraction. I see it as a body. ~ Antony Tudor
Abstraction quotes by Antony Tudor
The word war itself has a kind of glazing abstraction to it that conjures up bombs and bullets and so on, whereas my goal is to try to, so much as I can, capture the heart and the stomach and the back of the throat of readers who can lie in bed at night and participate in a story. ~ Tim O'Brien
Abstraction quotes by Tim O'Brien
Can one have love? If we could, love would need to be a thing, a substance that one can have, own, possess. The truth is, there is no such thing as "love." "Love" is abstraction, perhaps a goddess or an alien being, although nobody has ever seen this goddess. In reality, there exists only the act of loving. To love is a productive activity. It implies caring for, knowing, responding, affirming, enjoying: the person, the tree, the painting, the idea. It means bringing to life, increasing his/her/its aliveness. It is a process, self-renewing and self-increasing. ~ Erich Fromm
Abstraction quotes by Erich Fromm
And just what is Antoine Roquentin? An abstraction. A pale reflection of myself wavers in my consciousness. Antoine Roquentin . . . and suddenly the "I" pales, pales, and fades out. Lucid, ~ Jean-Paul Sartre
Abstraction quotes by Jean-Paul Sartre
You believe in a loving God. Then along comes criticism, or rejection (say, a relationship breaks up), or some failure that's a blow to your reputation in some realm. Anyone in such a situation will feel quite crestfallen and downcast. But there is a difference between being discouraged and being devastated, between sliding into despondency and not being able to function. If God's love is an abstraction, it is of no consolation. But if it is a felt and lived reality through prayer, then it buoys you up. ~ Timothy Keller
Abstraction quotes by Timothy Keller
Agape's object is always the concrete individual, not some abstraction called humanity. Love of humanity is easy because humanity does not surprise you with inconvenient demands. You never find humanity on your doorstep, stinking and begging. ~ Peter Kreeft
Abstraction quotes by Peter Kreeft
I felt like my parents were always involved with abstraction, and I wanted to do something very specific. ~ Lena Dunham
Abstraction quotes by Lena Dunham
Arabs are a complete abstraction in the propaganda world and all the death and destruction is completely unreal to Americans. ~ Aleksandar Hemon
Abstraction quotes by Aleksandar Hemon
The cartooning was always just an abstraction. It was an income. It was making me famous. It was allowing me to go and do other things that I'd wanted to do. ~ Berkeley Breathed
Abstraction quotes by Berkeley Breathed
Hierarchy is a kind of order of abstractions. ~ Grady Booch
Abstraction quotes by Grady Booch
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
Abstraction quotes by Novalis
A QUESTION OF VISION. From the sun's seat, after all, humanity is an abstraction. ~ Lauren Groff
Abstraction quotes by Lauren Groff
Worrying about what does not yet exist, is that a gesture of love or the worst kind of argument putting pressure on the living, an excess of scrupulous conscience? For fear of soiling our hands, we prefer to cut them off right now. [...] How far can responsibility go without turning into an abstraction? To extend it to all coming generations is to empty it of its meaning, to put a titanic weight on our shoulders. By being accountable for everything, we are accountable for nothing. We can receive no pardon for our errors, since those who would be in a position to grant it have not yet been born! A vicious circle: isn't sacrificing people today for the benefit of those to come also a way of penalizing the latter [...]? ~ Pascal Bruckner
Abstraction quotes by Pascal Bruckner
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
Abstraction quotes by Michael Shermer
Do not copy nature. Art is an abstraction. Rather, bring your art forth by dreaming in front of her and think more of creation. ~ Paul Gauguin
Abstraction quotes by Paul Gauguin
Thus, the sons of Plato proclaim "the death of God," i.e., the God of Scripture, because He refuses to exist in terms of their definition. It does not greatly trouble them to proclaim God dead; in fact, the supposed funeral is their celebration. The "death" of the God of Scripture, however, requires the death of the man created in His image, and, as a result, "the death of God" society seeks then to destroy historical man, the real man of time, in order to create a new man in terms of their idea and purpose.

Man as an Idea in philosophy and sociology is an inhuman abstraction; he is a monster who neither exists nor can exist. ~ Rousas John Rushdoony
Abstraction quotes by Rousas John Rushdoony
The intension of an analytic concept arises from the abstraction of the common qualities of a group of things. ~ John William Davis
Abstraction quotes by John William Davis
At the core," means," is an implementation and capability is an abstraction. ~ Pearl Zhu
Abstraction quotes by Pearl Zhu
[Beware of] the fallacy of misplaced concreteness [mistaking an abstraction for concrete reality, for actuality]

In the inescapable flux, there is something that abides; in the overwhelming permanence, there is an element that escapes into flux. Permanence can be snatched only out of flux; and the passing moment can find its adequate intensity only by its submission to permanence.

Error is the price we pay for progress.

In the real world it is more important that a proposition be interesting than that it be true. The importance of truth is that it adds to interest.

Creativity is the universal of universals characterizing ultimate matter of fact. It is that ultimate principle by which the many, which are the universe disjunctively, become the one actual occasion, which is the universe conjunctively. It lies in the nature of things that the many enter into complex unity.

The aim of science is to seek the simplest explanations of complex facts. We are apt to fall into the error of thinking that the facts are simple because simplicity is the goal of our quest. The guiding motto in the life of every natural philosopher should be, "Seek simplicity and distrust it."

It requires a very unusual mind to undertake the analysis of the obvious.

[From various of Whitehead's books, not only PR] ~ Alfred North Whitehead
Abstraction quotes by Alfred North Whitehead
There's a class of things to be afraid of: it's "those things that you should be afraid of". Those are the things that go bump in the night, right? You're always exposed to them when you go to horror movies, especially if they're not the gore type of horror movie. They're always hinting at something that's going on outside of your perceptual sphere, and they frighten you because you don't know what's out there. For that the Blair Witch Project was a really good example, because nothing ever happens in that movie but it's frightenting and not gory. It plays on the fact tht you do have a category of Those Things Of Which You Should Be Afraid. So it's a category, frightening things. And only things capable of abstraction can come up with something like the caregory of frightenting things.

And so Kali is like an embodied representation of the category of frightening things. And then you might ask yourself, well once you come up with the concept of the category of frightening things, maybe you can come up with the concept of what to do in the face of frightening things. Which is not the same as "what do you do when you encounter a lion", or "what do you do when you encounter someone angry". It's a meta question, right?

But then you could say, at a philosophical level: "You will encounter elements of the category of all those things which can frighten and undermine you during your life. Is there something that you can do *as a category* that would help you d ~ Jordan B. Peterson
Abstraction quotes by Jordan B. Peterson
The word 'abstract' comes from the light tower of the philosophers ... one of their spotlights that they have particularly focussed on 'Art' ... (abstraction was) not so much what you could paint but rather what you could not paint. You could not paint a house or a tree or a mountain. It was then that subject matter came into existence as something you ought not have. ~ Willem De Kooning
Abstraction quotes by Willem De Kooning
I'm trying not to delve into my world of abstraction and self-indulgence. But I haven't. When I sit down and I try not to [be abstract], it comes out really forced and awkward. ~ Spencer Krug
Abstraction quotes by Spencer Krug
Cloud storage in data centers will utilize the latest developments in physical storage virtualization, deduplication and other methods to make the most effective use of physical storage assets. Software defined storage could allow a further level of abstraction and cost effectiveness. The vast bulk of content stored "in the cloud" will reside on large SATA interface HDDs with some on magnetic (mostly LTO) tape (particularly for "archives.") ~ Tom Coughlin
Abstraction quotes by Tom Coughlin
Abstract means literally to draw from or separate. In this sense every artist is abstract. ~ Richard Diebenkorn
Abstraction quotes by Richard Diebenkorn
Conversation opens our views, and gives our faculties a more vigorous play; it puts us upon turning our notions on every side, and holds them up to a light that discovers those latent flaws which would probably have lain concealed in the gloom of unagitated abstraction. ~ William Melmoth
Abstraction quotes by William Melmoth
The first type of abstraction from objects I shall refer to as simple abstraction, but the second type I shall call reflective abstraction, using this term in a double sense. ~ Jean Piaget
Abstraction quotes by Jean Piaget
Age, like wealth is but a mental abstraction, my boy"~ Herr Doktor Pavel ~ K.W. Jeter
Abstraction quotes by K.W. Jeter
Abstraction is the way to the heart - it is not the heart itself. ~ John Piper
Abstraction quotes by John Piper
A child's stories are simpler to understand because the language has not been developed to the point of high abstraction. An adult tells stories far more obtuse in nature. ~ John S. Savage
Abstraction quotes by John S. Savage
Have you ever wondered what it feels like to have a love for the lost? This is a term we use as part of our Christian jargon. Many believers search their hearts in condemnation, looking for the arrival of some feeling of benevolence that will propel them into bold evangelism. It will never happen. It is impossible to love "the lost". You can't feel deeply for an abstraction or a concept. You would find it impossible to love deeply an unfamiliar individual portrayed in a photograph, let alone a nation or a race or something as vague as "all lost people".
Don't wait for a feeling or love in order to share Christ with a stranger. You already love your heavenly Father, and you know that this stranger is created by Him, but separated from Him, so take those first steps in evangelism because you love God. It is not primarily out of compassion for humanity that we share our faith or pray for the lost; it is first of all, love for God. ~ John Piper
Abstraction quotes by John Piper
Still another reason why the payment of taxes implies no consent, or pledge, to support the government, is that the taxpayer does not know, and has no means of knowing, who the particular individuals are who compose "the government." To him "the government" is a myth, an abstraction, an incorporeality, with which he can make no contract, and to which he can give no consent, and make no pledge. He knows it only through its pretended agents. "The government" itself he never sees. ~ Lysander Spooner
Abstraction quotes by Lysander Spooner
I think there's a little more attention to human needs than to property rights. But I don't think much of political activism. It's so shortsighted. Most people are interested in their own personal comfort. I've said that about environmentalists. I think they care about bike paths and places to park their Volvos, not the planet as an abstraction. ~ George Carlin
Abstraction quotes by George Carlin
Zen is a liberation from time. For if we open our eyes and see clearly, it becomes obvious that there is no other time than this instant, and that the past and the future are abstractions without any concrete reality. ~ Alan W. Watts
Abstraction quotes by Alan W. Watts
It was civilization itself which inflicted this wound upon modern man. Once the increase of empirical knowledge, and more exact modes of thought, made sharper divisions between the sciences inevitable, and once the increasingly complex machinery of State necessitated a more rigorous separation of ranks and occupations, then the inner unity of human nature was severed too, and a disastrous conflict set its harmonious powers at variance. The intuitive and the speculative understanding now withdrew in hostility to take up positions in their respective fields, whose frontiers they now began to guard with jealous mistrust; and with this confining of our activity to a particular sphere we have given ourselves a master within, who not infrequently ends by suppressing the rest of our potentialities. While in one a riotous imagination ravages the hard-won fruits of the intellect, in another the spirit of abstraction stifles the fire at which the heart should have warmed itself and the imagination been kindled. ~ Friedrich Schiller
Abstraction quotes by Friedrich Schiller
In learning, we draw an abstraction from concrete objects and events. In creating, we make our own concrete objects and events out of the abstraction; we bring the abstraction down and back to its specific meaning, to the concrete; but the abstraction has helped us to make the kind of concrete we want the concrete to be. It has helped us to create - to reshape the world as we wish it to be for our purposes. ~ Ayn Rand
Abstraction quotes by Ayn Rand
That, indeed, the Home Front is something of a fiction and lie, designed, not too subtly, to draw them apart, to subvert love in favor of work, abstraction, required pain, bitter death. ~ Thomas Pynchon
Abstraction quotes by Thomas Pynchon
In recent years my understanding of God had evolved into increasingly remote abstractions. I'd come to think of God in terms like Divine Reality, the Absolute, or the One who holds us in being. I do believe that God is beyond any form and image, but it has grown clear to me that I need an image in order to relate. I need an image in order to carry on an intimate conversation with what is so vast, amorphous, mysterious, and holy that it becomes ungraspable. I mean, really, how to you become intimate with Divine Reality? Or the Absolute? ~ Sue Monk Kidd
Abstraction quotes by Sue Monk Kidd
It was partly the war, the revolution did the rest. The war was an artificial break in life
as if life could be put off for a time
what nonsense! The revolution broke out willy-nilly like a sigh suppressed too long. Everyone was revived, reborn, changed, transformed. You might say that everyone has been through two revolutions
his own, personal revolution as well as the general one. It seems to me that socialism is the sea, and all these separate streams, these private, individual revolutions, are flowing into it
the sea of life, the sea of spontaneity. I said life, but I mean life as you see it in a great picture, transformed by genius, creatively enriched. Only now people have decided to experience it not in books and pictures, but in themselves, not as an abstraction but in practice. ~ Boris Pasternak
Abstraction quotes by Boris Pasternak
What fascinated me about English was what I later recognized as its hybrid etymoogy: blunt Anglo-Saxon concreteness, sleek Norman French urbanity, and polysyllabic Greco-Roman abstraction. The clash of these elements, as competitive as Italian dialects is invigorating, richly entertaining, and often funny, as it is to Shaskespeare, who gets tremendous effects out of their interplay. The dazzling multiplicity of sounds and word choices in English makes it brilliantly suited to be a language of poetry.. ~ Camille Paglia
Abstraction quotes by Camille Paglia
Those who tell you that the territorial question is an abstraction, that you can never colonize another territory without the African slavetrade, are both deaf and blind to the history of the last sixty years. ~ Robert Toombs
Abstraction quotes by Robert Toombs
A revolution was never fought, throughout history, for ideals. Revolutions were fought for much more concrete things: food, clothes, housing, and to relieve intolerable oppression. ... I know of no one, outside of Patrick Henry, willing to die for an abstraction. ~ William Powell
Abstraction quotes by William Powell
[...] no slaves down here, all that abstraction torn away like skin coming off a body, and these were people -- human fucking beings, each with the one life he was given, and this was the life they had. ~ Ben H. Winters
Abstraction quotes by Ben H. Winters
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
Abstraction quotes by Ambrose Bierce
No physicist started out impatient with common-sense notions, eager to replace them with some mathematical abstraction that could be understood only by rarified theoretical physics. Instead, they began, as we all do, with comfortable, standard, common-sense notions. The trouble is that Nature does not comply. If we no longer insist on our notions of how Nature ought to behave, but instead stand before Nature with an open and receptive mind, we find that common sense often doesn't work. Why not? Because our notions, both hereditary and learned, of how Nature works were forged in the millions of years our ancestors were hunters and gatherers. In this case common sense is a faithless guide because no hunter-gatherer's life ever depended on understanding time-variable electric and magnetic fields. There were no evolutionary penalties for ignorance of Maxwell's equations. In our time it's different. ~ Carl Sagan
Abstraction quotes by Carl Sagan
It is - their unconsciousness. Their lack of knowledge about others. Their not being aware of what they do to others, the destruction they have caused and are causing. [...] Do they ignore parts of reality? Yes. But it is more. It is their plans. Yes, their plans. The conquering of the planets. Something frenzied and demented, as was their conquering of Africa, and before that, Europe and Asia. 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. […] They want to be the agents, not the victims, of history. ~ Philip K. Dick
Abstraction quotes by Philip K. Dick
Ingres was one of those artists to whom the outline was something sacred and magical, and the reason is that it was the means of reconciling the major conflict in his art, the conflict between abstraction and sensibility. ~ Kenneth Clark
Abstraction quotes by Kenneth Clark
When Suzie introduced Helen, she told the audience that one of the best things about books is that they are an interactive art form: that while the author may describe in some detail how a character looks, it is the reader's imagination that completes the image, making it his or her own. "That's why we so often don't like movies made from books, right?" Suzie said. "We don't like someone else's interpretation of what we see so clearly." She talked, too, about how books educate and inspire, and how they soothe the soul-"like comfort food without the calories," she said. She talked about the tactile joys of reading, the feel of a page beneath one's fingers; the elegance of typeface on a page. She talked about how people complain that they don't have time to read, and reminded them that if they gave up half an hour of television a day in favor of reading, they could finish twenty-five books a year. "Books don't take time away from us," she said. "They give it back. In this age of abstraction, of multitasking, of speed for speed's sake, they reintroduce us to the elegance-and the relief!-of real, tick-tock time. ~ Elizabeth Berg
Abstraction quotes by Elizabeth Berg
The notion of a separate organism is clearly an abstraction, as is also its boundary. Underlying all this is unbroken wholeness even though our civilization has developed in such a way as to strongly emphasize the separation into parts. ~ David Bohm
Abstraction quotes by David Bohm
In a life, or a portion of a life illuminated, there's a fullness and a balance that no theory or abstraction can match. Why do people waste so much time on abstraction? The life that is given to us, that we play out, is something that you cannot any more grasp with systems and ideas than you can tame an elephant with tweezers. ~ Mark Helprin
Abstraction quotes by Mark Helprin
In the final scene of Power, the Supreme Court justices appear as a striking abstraction: Nine scowling masks line up in a row on top of a giant podium. Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes speaks the majority opinion: 'Water power, the right to convert it into electric energy, and the electric energy thus produced constitute property belonging to the United States. ~ Susan Quinn
Abstraction quotes by Susan Quinn
The expression 'to lose one's faith', as one might a purse or a ring of keys, has always seemed to me rather foolish. It must be one of those sayings of bourgeois piety, a legacy of those wretched priests of the eighteenth century who talked so much.

Faith is not a thing which one 'loses', we merely cease to shape our lives by it. That is why old-fashioned confessors are not far wrong in showing a certain amount of scepticism when dealing with 'intellectual crises', doubtless far more rare than people imagine. An educated man may come by degrees to tuck away his faith in some back corner of his brain, where he can find it again on reflection, by an effort of memory: yet even if he feels a tender regret for what no longer exists and might have been, the term 'faith' would nevertheless be inapplicable to such an abstraction, no more like real faith, to use a very well-worn simile, than the constellation of Cygne is like a swan. ~ Georges Bernanos
Abstraction quotes by Georges Bernanos
Time isn't made of anything. It is an abstraction. Just a meaning that we impose upon motion. ~ Anne Carson
Abstraction quotes by Anne Carson
Then she understood that what she needed was the motion to a purpose, no matter how small or in what form, the sense of an activity going step by step to some chosen end across a span of time. The work of cooking a meal was like a closed circle, completed and gone, leading nowhere. But the work of building a path was a living sum, so that no day was left to die behind her, but each day contained all those that preceded it, each day acquired its immortality on every succeeding tomorrow. A circle, she thought, is the movement proper to physical nature, they say that there's nothing but circular motion in the inanimate universe around us, but the straight line is the badge of man, the straight line of a geometrical abstraction that makes roads, rails and bridges, the straight line that cuts the curving aimlessness of nature by a purposeful motion from a start to an end. The cooking of meals, she thought, is like the feeding of coal to an engine for the sake of a great run, but what would be the imbecile torture of coaling an engine that had no run to make? It is not proper for man's life to be a circle, she thought, or a string of circles dropping off like zeros behind him--man's life must be a straight line of motion from goal to farther goal, each leading to the next and to a single growing sum, like a journey down the track of a railroad, from station to station to--oh, stop it! ~ Ayn Rand
Abstraction quotes by Ayn Rand
The lesson of bells is that no work is worth finishing, so why care too deeply about anything? Years of bells will condition all but the strongest to a world that no longer offer important work to do.
Bells destroy the past and future, rendering every interval the same as any other, as the abstraction of a map renders every living mountain and river the same, even though they are not. Bells inoculate each undertaking with significance. ~ John Taylor Gatto
Abstraction quotes by John Taylor Gatto
No matter how brilliant, amusing or intelligent the creek of abstraction, Dadaism, Minimalism and Conceptualism of the 20th century was, it didn't much affect the historical river of figuration. I predict that in 50 years and in 300 years, figurative art will still be strong and important. ~ Mark Kostabi
Abstraction quotes by Mark Kostabi
Dancing is the loftiest, the most moving, the most beautiful of the arts, because it is no mere translation or abstraction from life; it is life itself. ~ Havelock Ellis
Abstraction quotes by Havelock Ellis
I looked harder at Matthew 25 and realized that if  Jesus said "I was hungry and you fed me," then Christ's presence is not embodied in those who feed the hungry (as important as that work is), but Christ's presence is in the hungry being fed. Christ comes not in the form of those who visit the imprisoned but in the imprisoned being cared for. And to be clear, Christ does not come to us as the poor and hungry. Because, as anyone for whom the poor are not an abstraction but actual flesh-and-blood people knows, the poor and hungry and imprisoned are not a romantic special class of  Christlike people. And those who meet their needs are not a romantic special class of  Christlike people. We all are equally as sinful and saintly as the other. No, Christ comes to us in the needs of the poor and hungry, needs that are met by another so that the gleaming redemption of  God might be known. ... No one gets to play Jesus. But we do get to experience Jesus in that holy place where we meet others' needs and have our own needs met. ~ Nadia Bolz-Weber
Abstraction quotes by Nadia Bolz-Weber
Abstract liberty, like other mere abstractions, is not to be found. Liberty inheres in some sensible object; and every nation has formed to itself some favorite point, which by way of eminence becomes the criterion of their happiness. ~ Edmund Burke
Abstraction quotes by Edmund Burke
We do not wish to imitate nature, we do not wish to reproduce. We want to produce. We want to produce the way a plant produces its fruit, not depict. We want to produce directly, not indirectly. Since there is not a trace of abstraction in this art we call it concrete art. ~ Hans Arp
Abstraction quotes by Hans Arp
All suffering is suffering. As C. S. Lewis said, there is no such thing as "the sum of the world's suffering," an abstraction of the philosophers. There are simply individual people who hurt. And who wonder why God permits it. ~ Philip Yancey
Abstraction quotes by Philip Yancey
This idea that there is generality in the specific is of far-reaching importance. ~ Douglas R. Hofstadter
Abstraction quotes by Douglas R. Hofstadter
All that is alive tends toward color, individuality, specificity, effectiveness and opacity. All that is done with life inclines toward knowledge, abstraction, generality transfiguration and transparency. ~ Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
Abstraction quotes by Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
Since I've been rereading this book I'm anchored at point zero, considering a thousand strategies and points of view which soon dissolve, abstraction, abstraction, the gaze melts. ~ Nicole Brossard
Abstraction quotes by Nicole Brossard
I've always wondered, like, what is so masculine about abstraction? How did men get the ownership over this? ~ Cecily Brown
Abstraction quotes by Cecily Brown
All religions are good 'in principle' - but unfortunately this abstract Good has only rarely prevented their practitioners from behaving like bastards. ~ Paul Karl Feyerabend
Abstraction quotes by Paul Karl Feyerabend
Certain things need to be done again and again in life, but those things can be learned only in context, not as an abstraction. Different contexts must be provided in order to motivate students and to provide real world skills that will be remembered, not because they were studied and tested but because they were practicied again and again. ~ Roger Schank
Abstraction quotes by Roger Schank
Everywhere you turned, everything was happening, and everything that was happening took you away from all abstraction and into something human, where answers weren't so easy. ~ Pico Iyer
Abstraction quotes by Pico Iyer
Beauty comes from the balance between two and three dimensions, between abstraction and representation - I seek the equilibrium behind changing appearances. ~ Henri Matisse
Abstraction quotes by Henri Matisse
Thus he shut himself up, he lived there, he was absolutely satisfied with it, leaving on one side the prodigious questions which attract and terrify, the fathomless perspectives of abstraction, the precipices of metaphysics - all those profundities which converge, for the apostle in God, for the atheist in nothingness; destiny, good and evil, the way of being against being, the conscience of man, the thoughtful somnambulism of the animal, the transformation in death, the recapitulation of existences which the tomb contains, the incomprehensible grafting of successive loves on the persistent I, the essence, the substance, the Nile, and the Ens, the soul, nature, liberty, necessity; perpendicular problems, sinister obscurities, where lean the gigantic archangels of the human mind; formidable ~ Victor Hugo
Abstraction quotes by Victor Hugo
Routine, repetition, tedium, monotony, ephemeracy, inconsequence, abstraction, disorder, boredom, angst, ennui - these are the true hero's enemies, and make no mistake, they are fearsome indeed. For they are real. ~ David Foster Wallace
Abstraction quotes by David Foster Wallace
Everything will be all right - you know when? When people, just people, stop thinking of the United Nations as a weird Picasso abstraction and see it as a drawing they made themselves. ~ Dag Hammarskjold
Abstraction quotes by Dag Hammarskjold
It's no wonder we don't defend the land where we live. We don't live here. We live in television programs and movies and books and with celebrities and in heaven and by rules and laws and abstractions created by people far away and we live anywhere and everywhere except in our particular bodies on this particular land at this particular moment in these particular circumstances. ~ Derrick Jensen
Abstraction quotes by Derrick Jensen
It does not at first appear that an astronomer rapt in abstraction, while he gazes on a star, must feel more exquisite delight than a farmer who is conducting his team. ~ Isaac D'Israeli
Abstraction quotes by Isaac D'Israeli
I believe that history has shape, order, and meaning; that exceptional men, as much as economic forces, produce change; and that passe abstractions like beauty, nobility, and greatness have a shifting but continuing validity. ~ Camille Paglia
Abstraction quotes by Camille Paglia
The country of the tourist pamphlet always is another country, an embarrassing abstraction of the desirable that, thank God, does not exist on this planet, where there are always ants and bad smells and empty Coca-Cola bottles to keep the grubby finger-print of reality upon the beautiful. ~ Nadine Gordimer
Abstraction quotes by Nadine Gordimer
In the final analysis, that state of abstraction turns out to be a very specific set of conditions: white middle-class women suffering and responding to the sexist attitudes and conduct of white middle-class men and calling for equality with those particular men. This approach leaves the existing socioeconomic system with its fundamental reliance on racism and class bias unchallenged. It ~ Angela Y. Davis
Abstraction quotes by Angela Y. Davis
That was the beginning of her abstraction. ~ Alice Walker
Abstraction quotes by Alice Walker
We must know how to look into images to see that of which they are survivors. So that history, liberated from the pure past (that absolute, that abstraction), might help us to open the present of time. ~ Georges Didi-Huberman
Abstraction quotes by Georges Didi-Huberman
Today's children are living a childhood of firsts. They are the first daycare generation; the first truly multicultural generation; the first generation to grow up in the electronic bubble, the environment defined by computers and new forms of television; the first post-sexual revolution generation; the first generation for which nature is more abstraction than reality; the first generation to grow up in new kinds of dispersed, deconcentrated cities, not quite urban, rural, or suburban. ~ Richard Louv
Abstraction quotes by Richard Louv
Every man has to learn the points of the compass again as often as he awakes, whether from sleep or any abstraction. ~ Henry David Thoreau
Abstraction quotes by Henry David Thoreau
Sometimes gaining and losing are more intimately related than we like to think. And some things cannot be moved or owned. Some light does not make it all the way through the atmosphere, but scatters ... The blue of distance comes with time, with the discovery of melancholy, of loss, the texture of longing, of the complexity of the terrain we traverse, and with the years of travel. If sorrow and beauty are all tied up together, then perhaps maturity brings with it not ... abstraction, but an aesthetic sense that partially redeems the losses time brings and finds beauty in the faraway ... Some things we have only as long as they remain lost, some things are not lost only so long as they are distant. ~ Rebecca Solnit
Abstraction quotes by Rebecca Solnit
Law and society turns this conventional view on its head. "Real law" is law as it is lived in society, and the abstract ideal is itself a human artifact. Many interesting questions follow. How does real law actually operate? How are law and everyday life intertwined? Where does law as abstraction come from, and what purposes does it serve? What can we learn from the disparity between abstract law and real law? And, why is the idealized version of law so resilient even in the face of extensive contrary experience? ~ Kitty Calavita
Abstraction quotes by Kitty Calavita
Let us begin with a simple line,
Drawn as a child would draw it,
To indicate the horizon,

More real than the real horizon,
Which is less than line,
Which is visible abstraction, a ratio.

The line ravishes the page with implications
Of white earth, white sky! ~ James Galvin
Abstraction quotes by James Galvin
The philosopher Elaine Scarry has observed that "beauty always takes place in the particular." Cruelty, on the other hand, prefers abstraction. ~ Jonathan Safran Foer
Abstraction quotes by Jonathan Safran Foer
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
Abstraction quotes by Camille Paglia
Here is God's purpose - For God, to me, it seems, is a verb not a noun, proper or improper; is the articulation not the art, objective or subjective; is loving, not the abstraction "love" commanded or entreated; is knowledge dynamic, not legislative code, not proclamation law, not academic dogma, not ecclesiastic canon. Yes, God is a verb, the most active, connoting the vast harmonic reordering of the universe from unleashed chaos of energy. ~ R. Buckminster Fuller
Abstraction quotes by R. Buckminster Fuller
Keep Hope alive, particularly if Hope is the name of a very cute puppy and not some ill-defined abstraction that is in fact code for big government. ~ Jonah Goldberg
Abstraction quotes by Jonah Goldberg
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
Abstraction quotes by Emily Carr
Thou shalt make no image, no abstraction, including none of THE American, THE Swiss, THE German. ~ Karl Barth
Abstraction quotes by Karl Barth
It is a tedious cliché (and, unlike many clichés, it isn't even true) that science concerns itself with how questions, but only theology is equipped to answer why questions. What on Earth is a why question? Not every English sentence beginning with the word 'why' is a legitimate question. Why are unicorns hollow? Some questions simply do not deserve an answer. What is the colour of abstraction? What is the smell of hope? The fact that a question can be phrased in a grammatically correct English sentence doesn't make it meaningful, or entitle it to our serious attention. Nor, even if the question is a real one, does the fact that science cannot answer it imply that religion can. ~ Richard Dawkins
Abstraction quotes by Richard Dawkins
Don't grieve. Anything you lose comes round in another form. ~ Rumi
Abstraction quotes by Rumi
Philosophy does not exist. It is nothing but an hypostatized abstraction. ~ R.D. Laing
Abstraction quotes by R.D. Laing
He recognised that all the period of Odette's life which had elapsed before she first met him, a period of which he had never sought to form any picture in his mind, was not the featureless abstraction which he could vaguely see, but had consisted of so many definite, dated years, each crowded with concrete incidents. But were he to learn more of them, he feared lest her past, now colourless, fluid and supportable, might assume a tangible, an obscene form, with individual and diabolical features. And he continued to refrain from seeking a conception of it, not any longer now from laziness of mind, but from fear of suffering. ~ Marcel Proust
Abstraction quotes by Marcel Proust
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
Abstraction quotes by George Lakoff
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