Concrete Of Abstract Quotes

…she had a dream, and in that dream Jesus came to her and said, 'You are from the stars and you came here to heal the world,' so she made her mom and dad change her name to Starla. I think it's cosmically perfect, like her, and kind of fitting because her face is covered in a galaxy of freckles. ~ James Brandon

...on a number of occasions this book has made reference to magic, and each time you've shaken your head, muttering such criticisms as "What does he mean by 'magic' anyhow? It's embarrassing to find a grown man talking about magic in such a manner. How can anybody take him seriously?" Or, as slightly more gracious readers have objected, "Doesn't the author realize that one can't write about magic? One can create it but not discuss it. It's much too gossamer for that. Magic can be neither described nor defined. Using words to describe magic is like using a screwdriver to slice roast beef."

To which the author now replies, Sorry, freeloaders, you're clever but you're not quite correct. Magic isn't the fuzzy, fragile, abstract and ephemeral quality you think it is. In fact, magic is distinguished from mysticism by its very concreteness and practicality. Whereas mysticism is manifest only in spiritual essence, in the transcendental state, magic demands a steady naturalistic base. Mysticism reveals the ethereal in the tangible. Magic makes something permanent out of the transitory, coaxes drama from the colloquial. ~ Tom Robbins

I realize that many elements of the Buddhist teaching can be found in Christianity, Judaism, Islam. I think if Buddhism can help, it is the concrete methods of practice. ~ Nhat Hanh

Whenever we read a line of the Bible, we must say, Lord Jesus, let me contact You in the divine Word. Lord, You are the living Word. Without You as the living Word I can receive nothing as life from the written Word. Lord, I must contact You. Although You are so mysterious, I praise You that You have given me such a tangible Word. This Word is solid, concrete, and substantial. I thank You for the Word that I can read and pray with. Yet, Lord, what I need is not the letter in black and white, but You, the living Spirit. ~ Witness Lee

The 'pure' red of which certain abstractionists speak does not exist. Any red is rooted in blood, glass, wine, hunters' caps and a thousand other concrete phenomena. Otherwise we would have no feeling toward red and its relations ... ~ Robert Motherwell

The language of film is further and further away from the language of theater and is closer to music. It's abstract but still narrative. ~ Emmanuel Lubezki

Height, width, and depth are the three phenomena which I must transfer into one plane to form the abstract surface of the picture, and thus to protect myself from the infinity of space. ~ Max Beckmann

The writers of Scripture enter into the random everyday depths of popular life, taking seriously whatever is encountered there, clinging to the concrete and refusing to systematize experience in concepts. ~ Erich Auerbach

I am searching for abstract ways of expressing reality, abstract forms that will enlighten my own mystery. ~ Eric Cantona

When, some months later, Zoltan emailed me about his decision to run for president, I immediately called him. The first thing I asked was what his wife thought of the plan.

"Well, in a way," he said, "it was Lisa who gave me the idea. Remember how I said she wanted me to do something concrete, get some kind of a proper job?"

"I do," I said. "Although I'm guessing running for president on the immortality platform was not what she had in mind."

"That's correct," he confirmed. "It took a little while for her to come around to the idea."

"How did you break it to her?"

"I left a note on the refrigerator," he said, "and went out for a couple hours. ~ Mark O'Connell

Clean your face," I said to the child. "It's dirty." "It's not," the child said. "By God it is," I said, "filth adheres in ine areas which I shall enumerate." "That is because of the dough," the child said. "We were taking death masks." "Dough!" I exclaimed, shocked at the idea that the child had wasted flour and water and no doubt paper too in this lightsome pastime, taking death masks. "Death!" I exclaimed for added emphasis. "What do you know of death?" "It is the end of the world," the child said, "for the death-visited individual. The world ends," the child said, "when you turn out your eyes." This was true, I could not dispute it. I returned to the main point. "Your father is telling you to wash your face," I said, locating myself in the abstract where I was more comfortable. ~ Donald Barthelme

Violence is not just an abstract noun.....its a way of life. ~ Jean-Marc Akerele

The Universe was a silly place at best ... but the least likely explanation for it was the no-explanation of random chance, the conceit that abstract somethings 'just happened' to be atoms that 'just happened' to get together in ways which 'just happened' to look like consistent laws and some configurations 'just happened' to possess self-awareness and that two 'just happened' to be the Man from Mars and a bald-headed old coot with Jubal inside. ~ Robert A. Heinlein

as masters of technical weapons we are fighting the environment as if we still believed ourselves to be strangers on the earth, sent down into this world from a purely abstract, ideational, and spiritual heaven. ~ Alan W. Watts

He reminds me of someone I used to know. One sharp breath and I'm shocked back to reality. No more daydreams. "Why are you here?" I ask the cracks in the concrete wall. 14 cracks in 4 walls a thousand shades of gray. ~ Tahereh Mafi

Out along the dim six-o'clock street, I saw leafless trees standing, striking the sidewalk there like wooden lightning, concrete split apart where they hit, all in a fenced-in ring. An iron line of pickets stuck out of the ground along the front of a tangleweed yard, and on back was a big frame house with a porch, leaning a rickety shoulder hard into the wind so's not to be sent tumbling away a couple of blocks like an empty cardboard grocery box. ~ Ken Kesey

I now believe that evolution, or deevolution, never ends short of death, that no society has ever achieved an absolute pinnacle, that all humans are not created equal. In fact, I believe attempts to create some abstract equalization create a morass of injustices that rebound on the equalizers. Equal justice and equal opportunity are ideals we should seek, but we should recognize that humans administer the ideals and that humans do not have equal ability. ~ Frank Herbert

Economics may not fundamentally be about value creation in real business. At its best it may be an idealized and abstract view of markets built around the goals of prediction, not around the way that actual business works. It is clearly useful for many purposes, but perhaps not for solving the problems of understanding business in the twenty-first century. ~ Freeman Et Al

Even the recognition of an individual whom we see every day is only possible as the result of an abstract idea of him formed by generalization from his appearances in the past. ~ James G. Frazer

O reason, reason, abstract phantom of the waking state, I had already expelled you from my dreams, now I have reached a point where those dreams are about to become fused with apparent realities: now there is only room here for myself. ~ Louis Aragon

The focus of history and philosophy of science scholar Arthur Miller's (2010) "137: Jung and Pauli and the Pursuit of Scientific Obsession" is Jung and Pauli's
mutual effort to discover the cosmic number or fine structure constant, which is a fundamental physical constant dealing with electromagnetism, or, from a different perspective, could be considered the philosopher's stone of the mathematical universe.
This was indeed one of Pauli and Jung's collaborative passions, but it was not the only concentration of their relationship. Quantum physics could be seen as the natural progression from ancient alchemy, through chemistry, culminating in the abstract world of subatomic particles, wave functions, and mathematics. [Ancient Egypt and Modern Psychotherapy] ~ Todd Hayen

As science has become more abstract and remote from everyday experience, the role of metaphor in our descriptions of the world has become more central. The language that nature speaks, as Galileo long pointed out, is mathematics. The language that ordinary human beings speak, especially those of us who are not fluent in mathematics, is metaphor. Lightman ends his discussion with another metaphor: "We are blind men, imagining what we don't see." That is a good description of theoretical physics. ~ Freeman Dyson

There are prisons of all kinds, Zoey, they take every shape imaginable. They aren't just concrete, and steel, and stone. They're everywhere. And even when you've escaped one, there's always another waiting. But you must remember that the first step to freedom doesn't always start with picking a lock." He reaches out and touches her temple. "It begins here." Slowly ~ Joe Hart

He had opened up for me the world of the real, of which I had known practically nothing and from which I had always shrunk. I had learned to look more closely at life as it was lived, to recognize that there were such things as facts in the world, to emerge from the realm of mind and idea and to place certain values on the concrete and objective phases of existence. ~ Jack London

Multiple personalities. Don't freak out but I'm pretty sure I have them. Not a clinical thing, not a disease. But a distraction to be sure. There are maybe six or seven pretty concrete versions of myself knocking around in here and I mean it gets fucking crowded when everybody is drunk or talking at once. ~ Will Christopher Baer

What is the use of discussing a man's abstract right to food or medicine? The question is upon the method of procuring and administering them. In that deliberation I shall always advise to call in the aid of the farmer and the physician rather than the professor of metaphysics. ~ Edmund Burke

In 1517, few western Christians worried that Muslims might have a more convincing message to offer than Christianity or that Christian youth might start converting to Islam. The Turks were at the gate, it's true, but they weren't in the living room, and they certainly weren't in the bedroom. The Turks posed a threat to the physical health of Christians, but not to the spiritual health of Christianity.

Muslims were in a different boat. Almost from the start, as I've discussed, Islam had offered its political and military successes as an argument for its doctrines and a proof of its revelations. The process began with those iconic early battles at Badr and Uhud, when the outcome of battle was shown to have theological meaning. The miracle of expansion and the linkage of victory with truth continued for hundreds of years.

Then came the Mongol holocaust, which forced Muslim theologians to reexamine their assumptions. That process spawned such reforms as Ibn Taymiyah. Vis-a-vis the Mongols, however, the weakness of Muslims was concrete and easy to understand. The Mongols had greater killing power, but they came without an ideology. When the bloodshed wound down and the human hunger for meaning bubbled up, as it always does, they had nothing to offer. In fact, they themselves converted. Islam won in the end, absorbing the Mongols as it has absorbed the Turks before them and the Persians before that.
...
The same could not be said of the new overlor ~ Tamim Ansary

The beauty of word processing, God bless my word processor, is that it keeps the plotting very fluid. The prose becomes like a liquid that you can manipulate at will. In the old days, when I typed, every piece of typing paper was like cast in concrete. ~ Sue Grafton

I think you have to look at these cold cases. If they're done properly, if the homicides are done properly, and everything's documented properly, you have a lot of concrete statements from those people that they would be able to look at them and refresh their memory. ~ Mark Fuhrman

I'm fascinated by how much has changed from one generation to another. There are young people growing up now for whom apartheid is just a distant memory and the idea of military service is an abstract notion. ~ Damon Galgut

Standing there small among the boxes of Kandy Kakes that rose like brownish cartoon cliffs around him, he resembled the videos I'd seen of sea lions floating angelically among the kelp, black bodies filmed from below, their shapes cut out in bright sunlight, bodies mistakable for those of a human being. I felt the memory of a shadowy arm around me, a watcher again, sitting there on the couch with my boyfriend, watching the animals become prey. Somewhere there were giant whales feeding on creatures too small to see, pressing them against fronds of baleen with a tongue the size of a sedan. There were polar bears killing seals, tearing ovoid chunks from out of their smooth, round bellies. In the surrounding vastness of the warehouse, I heard something scratching against the concrete floor and knew there were rats here, scraping a thin film of nutrient from the dry packaged matter that surrounded them. Life was everywhere, inescapable, imperative. ~ Alexandra Kleeman

I'd like to explore the more abstract side of people's minds, as opposed to the usual sitcom stuff. I don't want to do the typical sitcom-type humor. I'd want to do stuff like go bowling with pineapples. ~ Harland Williams

The Law is one aspect of a much more concrete and encompassing relation than the relation between commanding and obeying that characterizes the imperative. ~ Paul Ricoeur

Finally, the dirty little secret about sexual objectification is that it is an act that cannot be performed with any attention to its ethical meaning. Experientially - from the point of view of a man who is sexually objectifying - sexual objectification and ethical self awareness are mutually exclusive. A man cannot reflect on what he is doing and its real consequences for real people and at the same time fully accomplish the act of sexual objectifying. There's no way it can be done, because hos own subjective reality is too contingent upon the unreality of someone else. All that can be left "out there" in his field of awareness is the other person's sexedness - an abstract representation of a gender - in comparison with which his own sexedness may flourish and engorge. So it is that a man shuts off his capacity for ethical empathy - whatever capacity he may ever had - in order to commit an act of despersonalization that is "gratifying" essentially because it functions to fulfill his sense of an identity that is authentically male. ~ John Stoltenberg

'Look at Me' started with Rockford, Illinois and New York and the question of how much image culture was changing our inner lives. That's an abstract idea; you don't think that's going to be a rocking work of fiction, but it seemed to fuse in a way that was interesting. ~ Jennifer Egan

The dignity of history consists in reciting events with truth and accuracy, and in presenting human agents and their actions in an interesting and instructive form. The first element in history, therefore, is truthfulness; and this truthfulness must be displayed in a concrete form. ~ Daniel Webster