Rationament Abstract Quotes

He spent the afternoon watching the indicator light turn from red to orange to green and thought about how useless it was to be angry at anybody about an abstract principle ... How could any idea that drives a man away from the people who love him be considered sound? ~ Ryan Boudinot

Shekinah means the glory or the radiance of God dwelling in the midst of his people. It denotes the immediate Presence of God as opposed to a God who is abstract or aloof. ~ Richard J. Foster

We might treat a rabbit as a pet or become emotionally attached to a goose, but we had come from cities and supermarkets, where flesh was hygienically distanced from any resemblance to living creatures. A shrink-wrapped pork chop has a sanitized, abstract appearance that has nothing whatever to do with the warm, mucky bulk of a pig. Out here in the country there was no avoiding the direct link between death and dinner. ~ Peter Mayle

The most important lesson to take away from allowing the minimum wage and unemployment benefit data to talk is that abstract notions of what is right, good and just should be examined from a concrete, operational point of view. A dose of reality is most edifying. ~ Steve Hanke

The explanatory stories that people find compelling are simple; are concrete rather than abstract; assign a larger role to talent, stupidity, and intentions than to luck; and focus on a few striking events that happened rather than on the countless events that failed to happen. ~ Daniel Kahneman

I think there are plenty of men out there who are capable and accomplished in their own realm. You don't have to be in the same field. I've often been asked, "Didn't you want to get married?" And of course I wanted to get married, but you have to fall in love and want to marry a particular person. You don't get married in the abstract. So, although there were people I felt I might have married, it just never happened. ~ Condoleezza Rice

Tolkien, then, was a philologist before he was a mythologist, and a mythologist, at least in intention, before he ever became a writer of fantasy fiction. His beliefs about language and about mythology were sometimes original and sometimes extreme, but never irrational, and he was able to express them perfectly clearly. In the end he decided to express them not through abstract argument, but by demonstration, and the success of the demonstration has gone a long way to showing that he did often have a point: especially in his belief, which I share, that a taste for philology, for the history of language in all its forms, names and place-names included, is much more widespread in the population at large than educators and arbiters of taste like to think. In his 1959 'Valedictory Address to the University of Oxford' (reprinted in Essays, pp. 224-40), Tolkien concluded that the problem lay not with the philologists nor with those they taught but with what he called 'misologists' – haters of the word. There would be no harm in them if they simply concluded language study was not for them, out of dullness or ignorance. But what he felt, Tolkien said, was:

"grievance that certain professional persons should suppose their dullness and ignorance to be a human norm; and anger when they have sought to impose the limitation of their minds upon younger minds, dissuading those with philological curiosity from their bent, encouraging those without this interest to believe that ~ Tom Shippey

bad things do not happen because of a wildly complex swirl of abstract historical and social variables. They happen because bad men live to stalk our happiness. And you can fight, and possibly even defeat, bad men. If you can read the hidden story ~ Jonathan Gottschall

Music, I find, gets you out of a trap [when screenwriting], because it speaks to your emotions directly, it's an abstract thing, it's not concerned with plot or story. And so music really helps - often I'll listen to the music and just write anything, just to get through. ~ Tony Grisoni

To become aware of what is constant in the flux of nature and life is the first step in abstract thinking. The recognition of regularity in the courses of the heavenly bodies and in the succession of seasons first provides a basis for a systematic ordering of events, and this knowledge makes possible a calendar ... Simultaneously with this concept, a system of relationships comes into the idea of the world. Change is not something absolute, chaotic, and kaleidoscopic; its manifestation is a relative one, something connected with fixed points and a given order. ~ Hellmut Wilhelm

And it's kind of my own fault too, in the sense that I've used my own life as a literary device so much. I think people feel very comfortable reviewing the idea of me, as opposed to what I've actually written. I find that most of the time, when people write about one of my books, they're really just writing about what they think I may or may not represent, as sort of this abstract entity. Is that unfair? Not really. If I put myself in this position where I'm going to kind of weave elements of memoir into almost everything, well, I suppose that's going to happen. ~ Chuck Klosterman

Living in Beijing, writing about politically sensitive things now and then, you get used to the idea that somebody, somewhere, might be watching. But it is usually an abstract threat. ~ Evan Osnos

Our return to an image-based culture means the destruction of the abstract thought made possible by a literate, print-based society. Image-based societies do not grasp or cope with ambiguity, nuance, doubt and the many layers of irrational motives and urges, some of them frightening, that make human actions complex and finally unfathomable. They eschew self-criticism for amusement. They build fantastic non-reality-based belief systems that cater to human desires and illusions rather than human reality. These illusions, whether religious or secular, offer a simple and unexamined myth that the human race is advancing morally, spiritually and materially toward paradise. This advance is proclaimed as inevitable. This faith in our advancement makes us passive and complacent. ~ Chris Hedges

But art and religion will always shadow one another through the abstract nouns they both invoke: truth, seriousness, imagination, sympathy, morality, transcendence. ~ Julian Barnes

Much of the colony's musical experimenting was, quite consciously, concerned with what might be called "time span." What was the briefest note that the mind could grasp - or the longest that it could tolerate without boredom? Could the result be varied by conditioning or by the use of appropriate orchestration? Such problems were discussed endlessly, and the arguments were not purely academic. They had resulted in some extremely interesting compositions. But it was in the art of the cartoon film, with its limitless possibilities, that New Athens had made its most successful experiments. The hundred years since the time of Disney had still left much undone in this most flexible of all mediums. On the purely realistic side, results could be produced indistinguishable from actual photography - much to the contempt of those who were developing the cartoon along abstract lines. ~ Arthur C. Clarke

You paint from your subject, not what you see ... I rarely paint anything I don't know very well. It was surprising to me to see how many people separate the objective from the abstract. Objective painting is not good painting unless it is good in the abstract sense. A hill or tree cannot make a good painting just because it is a hill or a tree. It is lines and colors put together so that they say something. For me that is the very basis of painting. The abstraction is often the most definite form for the intangible thing in myself that I can only clarify in paint. ~ Georgia O'Keeffe

Five senses; an incurably abstract intellect; a haphazardly selective memory; a set of preconceptions and assumptions so numerous that I can never examine more than a minority of them - never become even conscious of them all. ~ C.S. Lewis

I came to New York, and it was fascinating and intimidating and yielding, and all the stuff it's supposed to be. But whatever the abstract essence I was seeking, I couldn't find exactly that. ~ Richard Greenberg

We humans have a wide range of abilities that help us perceive and analyze mathematical content. We perceive abstract notions not just through seeing but also by hearing, by feeling, by our sense of body motion and position. Our geometric and spatial skills are highly trainable, just as in other high-performance activities. In mathematics we can use the modules of our minds in flexible ways - even metaphorically. A whole-mind approach to mathematical thinking is vastly more effective than the common approach that manipulates only symbols. ~ William Thurston

There again," said Syme irritably, "what is there poetical about being in revolt? You might as well say that it is poetical to be sea-sick. Being sick is a revolt. Both being sick and being rebellious may be the wholesome thing on certain desperate occasions; but I'm hanged if I can see why they are poetical. Revolt in the abstract is – revolting. It's mere vomiting. ~ G.K. Chesterton

Concepts like millionaire and money are abstract and part of a delusional world, so you won't be able to understand the application of the knowledge if you keep thinking with the same paradigm that made you poor. ~ Daniel Marques

People joke, in our field, about Pythagoras and his religious cult based on perfect geometry and other abstract mathematical forms, but if we are going to have religion at all then a religion of mathematics seems ideal, because if God exists then what is He but a mathematician? ~ Matt Haig

A mismatched outfit, a slightly defective denture, an exquisite mediocrity of the soul-those are the details that make a woman real, alive. The women you see on posters or in fashion magazines-the ones all the women try to imitate nowadays-how can they be attractive? They have no reality of their own; they're just the sum of a set of abstract rules. They aren't born of human bodies; they hatch ready-made from the computers." ~The Book of Laughter and Forgetting ~ Milan Kundera

In the beginning, the earth was without form, and void and the darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. And god said, 'Let there be light.' and there was light. Only, it wasn't good light. Bob created fireworks, sparklers and neon tubes that circled the globe like weird tangled rainbows. He dabbled with bugs that blinked and abstract creatures whose heads lit up and cast long overlapping shadows. There were mile-high candles and mountains of fairy lights. For an hour or so, earth was lit by enormous crystal chandeliers. Bob thought his creations were cool. They were cool, but they didn't work ~ Meg Rosoff

We shared a bond I don't think can ever be broken. We helped them reclaim their nation, and they helped us reclaim ours. They showed us the meaning of democracy ... freedom, not just in vague, abstract terms, but on a very real, individually human level. Freedom isn't just something you have for the sake of having, you have to want something else first and then want the freedom to fight for it. That was the lesson we learned from the Nortecubanos. They all had such grand dreams, and they'd lay down their lives for the freedom to make those dreams come true. ~ Max Brooks

Humans are in delusion by default, and those who conquer their delusion can understand good and evil. Morality is an arbitrary abstract, it is not good or evil and those who provoke morality a righteous act, are still at the sideways of delusion and conquer. ~ M.F. Moonzajer

One other thing to keep in mind, though, is that Cantor's transfinite math will end up totally undercutting Aristotelian objections like the above (b) to Dedekind's proof, since Cantor's theory will constitute direct evidence that actually-infinite sets can be understood and manipulated, truly handled by the human intellect, just as velocity and acceleration are handled by calculus. So one thing to appreciate up front is that, however abstract infinite systems are, after Cantor they are most definitely not abstract in the nonreal/unreal way that unicorns are. ~ Georg Cantor

We must praise God or live in unreality and poverty. We cannot merely believe in our minds that he is loving or wise or great. We must praise him for those things - and praise him to others - if we are to move beyond abstract knowledge to heart-changing engagement. ~ Timothy Keller

At this stage in the advancement of women the best policy for them is not to talk much about the abstract principles of women'srights but to do good work in any job they get, better work if possible than their male colleagues. ~ Virginia Gildersleeve

So I make one phone call, and just like that, we're eating pizza at 6:30. What is this world? You tap seven abstract figures onto a piece of plastic thin as a billfold, hold that plastic device to your head, use your lungs and vocal cords to indicate more abstractions, and in thirty minutes, a guy pulls up in a 2,000-pound machine made on an island on the other side of the world, fueled by viscous liquid made from the rotting corpses of dead organisms pulled from the desert on yet another side of the world and you give this man a few sheets of green paper representing the abstract wealth of your home nation, and he gives you a perfectly reasonable facsimile of one of the staples of the diet of a people from yet another faraway nation.
And the mushrooms are fresh. ~ Jess Walter

I remember one occasion when I tried to add a little seasoning to a review, but I wasn't allowed to. The paper was by Dorothy Maharam, and it was a perfectly sound contribution to abstract measure theory. The domains of the underlying measures were not sets but elements of more general Boolean algebras, and their range consisted not of positive numbers but of certain abstract equivalence classes. My proposed first sentence was: "The author discusses valueless measures in pointless spaces." ~ Paul Halmos

You don't approach a case with the philosophy of applying abstract justice-you go in to win ~ Percy Foreman

Clearly, mythology is no toy for children. Nor is it a matter of archaic, merely scholarly concern, of no moment to modern men of action. For its symbols (whether in the tangible form of images or in the abstract form of ideas) touch and release the deepest centers of motivation, moving literate and illiterate alike, moving mobs, moving civilizations. ~ Joseph Campbell

Poetry is a sort of inspired mathematics, which gives us equations, not for abstract figures, triangles, squares, and the like, but for the human emotions. If one has a mind which inclines to magic rather than science, one will prefer to speak of these equations as spells or incantations; it sounds more arcane, mysterious, recondite.
~ Ezra Pound

It sometimes seems to me that a pestilence has struck the human race in its most distinctive faculty - that is, the use of words. It is a plague afflicting language, revealing itself as a loss of cognition and immediacy, an automatism that tends to level out all expression into the most generic, anonymous, and abstract formulas, to dilute meaning, to blunt the edge of expressiveness, extinguishing the sparks that shoots out from the collision of words and new circumstances. ~ Italo Calvino

English political sagacity is compounded of instinctive reactions to immediate situations and a wisdom, gained by cumulative experience, which guides instinct through the complexities, intricacies and imponderabilities of modern politics. The most typical social philosopher of England is not John Locke but Edmund Burke. Constitutional government may have found its first justification in the rationally elaborated theories of "rights" in the philosophy of the former. But the actual history of constitutionalism in England has been dominated by the logic expressed in the philosophy of the latter. The Englishman trusts not in the abstract "natural rights" dictated by reason, but the "English rights" which are guaranteed to him by his own history. ~ Reinhold Neibuhr

The truth I love in loving my brother cannot be something merely philosophical and abstract. It must be at the same time supernatural and concrete, practical and alive. And I mean these words in no metaphorical sense. The truth I must love in my brother is God Himself, living in him. I must seek the life of the Spirit of God breathing in him. And I can only discern and follow that mysterious life by the action of the same Holy Spirit living and acting in the depths of my own heart. ~ Thomas Merton

I imagined a labyrinth of labyrinths, a maze of mazes, a twisting, turning, ever-widening labyrinth that contained both past and future and somehow implied the stars. Absorbed in those illusory imaginings, I forgot that I was a pursued man; I felt myself, for an indefinite while, the abstract perceiver of the world. The vague, living countryside, the moon, the remains of the day did their work in me; so did the gently downward road, which forestalled all possibility of weariness. The evening was near, yet infinite. ~ Jorge Luis Borges