Quotes About Abstraction

#1. Many of the most frequent fallacies in economic reasoning come from the propensity, especially marked today, to think in terms of an abstraction - the collectivity, the "nation" - and to forget or ignore the individuals who make it up and give it meaning.

Henry Hazlitt

#2. 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

#3. I think, though, that perspective-awareness may follow from a kind of speaking that also came into my work more recently - the "assay" poems (some labeled that, some not) that engage an abstraction or object from multiple angles.

Jane Hirshfield

#4. I've heard many times that with all good artists it's ultimately a self-portrait even if it's an abstraction. I feel my work is very much who I am. I didn't try to make it that way; it just is. It reflects who I am and also my interests.

Joyce Tenneson

#5. That was the beginning of her abstraction.

Alice Walker

#6. 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

#7. The economy is not an abstraction. The economy consists of people, and it will only grow if people feel secure and are reasonably free.

John Bruton

#8. I am fully and entirely concentrated on the board. I never even consider my opponent's personality. So far as I am concerned, my opponent might as well be an abstraction or an automaton.

Wilhelm Steinitz

#9. 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

#10. Abstraction is one of the greatest visionary tools ever invented by human beings to imagine, decipher, and depict the world.

Jerry Saltz

#11. If I choose abstraction over reality, it is because I consider it the lesser chaos.

Robert Breault

#12. In his mind a protective glaze had been applied to the crystal forms of high abstraction: he loved to regard them, and to wonder at their shine, but he had never thought to take them down from their carved and oaken mantel, so to speak, and feel them, supple in his hands.

Eleanor Catton

#13. Abstraction returned as soon as artists tried to come to closer grips with reality than naturalistic representation permitted ...

Sigfried Giedion

#14. The Hindus have cultivated the power of analysis and abstraction. No nation has yet produced a grammar like that of Panini.

Swami Vivekananda

#15. Cubism did not accept the logical consequences of its own discoveries; it was not developing abstraction towards its own goal, the expression of pure reality.

Piet Mondrian

#16. The theory of thought is like painting: it needs that revolution which took art from representation to abstraction. This is the aim of a theory of thought without image.

Gilles Deleuze

#17. Abstraction allows man to see with his mind what he cannot see physically with his eyes ... Abstract art enables the artist to perceive beyond the tangible, to extract the infinite out of the finite. It is the emancipation of the mind. It is an exploration into unknown areas.

Arshile Gorky

#18. At long last he was unencumbered, emancipated from the stifling world of his parents and peers, a world of abstraction and security and material excess, a world in which he felt grievously cut off from the raw throb of existence.

Jon Krakauer

#19. Sometimes abstraction and encapsulation are at odds with performance - although not nearly as often as many developers believe - but it is always a good practice first to make your code right, and then make it fast.

Brian Goetz

#20. [...] 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

#21. For a moment he seemed impressed with the speaking loneliness of the scene, or rather with the complete abstraction from all its compass of the sights and sounds of man.

Thomas Hardy

#22. As always he behaved as if he were an abstraction, not really there, a machine without a soul.

Doris Lessing

#23. At that time the only treatment of angelism, that is, excessive abstraction of the self from itself, was recovery of the self through ordeal.

Walker Percy

#24. Become aware of internal, subjective, sub-verbal experiences, so that these experiences can be brought into the world of abstraction ...

Abraham Maslow

#25. I feel most free onstage. The audience, it's an abstraction. You don't really see anyone out there, but you feel the audience inside you.

Kim Gordon

#26. I think, with abstraction, it's easy to fall into a sort of pastiche.

Joe Bradley

#27. 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

#28. 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

#29. Faith is not a generalized abstraction but a way of life that is expressed in persistent prayer.

Eugene H. Peterson

#30. Part of knowing who we are is knowing we are not someone else. And Jew is only the name we give to that stranger, the agony we cannot feel, the death we look at like a cold abstraction. Each man has his Jew; it is the other.

Arthur Miller

#31. At the core," means," is an implementation and capability is an abstraction.

Pearl Zhu

#32. Nothing so tires a person as having to struggle, not with himself, but with an abstraction.

Jose Saramago

#33. Abstraction is an exercise in a pre-assured failure. It is a futile attempt to communicate the non-communicable

Derek R. Audette

#34. There are ages in which the rational man and the intuitive man stand side by side, the one in fear of intuition, the other with scorn for abstraction. The latter is just as irrational as the former is inartistic.

Friedrich Nietzsche

#35. What the churches are peddling is high abstraction, and you really have to work yourself up into a lather to be able to accept that as worthy of that kind of attention. The psychedelic subset of society is into an experience, and it's accessible.

Terence McKenna

#36. ...concepts have three fundamental properties - contextuality, intentionality, and abstraction - which independent things do not. To produce a mental world from the physical world, the physical world must first explain how contextuality, intentionality, and abstraction can arise.

Ashish Dalela

#37. We have tried to fit man into abstraction, but he does not fit.

Mark Tobey

#38. Life as observed only from the scientific point of view is bare abstraction; it is not concrete life; nor is life as observed only in the interrelated-will-attitude point of view the whole of life. Both are abstractions. Concrete life includes both phases.

Kaiten Nukariya

#39. I expect of abstraction as much as what imagery does for me ... to carry meaning.

Kay WalkingStick

#40. Early-twentieth-century abstraction is art's version of Einstein's Theory of Relativity. It's the idea that changed everything everywhere: quickly, decisively, for good.

Jerry Saltz

#41. The language of art is powerful to those who understand it, and puzzling to those who do not. What we do know is that here was the modern human mind at work, spinning symbolism and abstraction in a way that only Homo sapiens is capable of doing.

Richard Leakey

#42. An abstraction will move a mountain: Nothing can withstand an idea.

Isabel Paterson

#43. A great man la an abstraction of some one excellence; but whoever fancies himself an abstraction of excellence, so far from being great, may be sure that he is a blockhead, equally ignorant of excellence or defect of himself or others.

William Hazlitt

#44. Such is the power of death -- to strip away breath and transform a person into an airy abstraction.

Anita Rau Badami

#45. When truth is nothing but truth, it's unnatural, it's an abstraction that resembles nothing in the real world.

Aldous Huxley

#46. It is presupposed that no entity can be conceived in complete abstraction from the system of the universe, and that it is the business of speculative philosophy to exhibit this truth. This character is its coherence.

Alfred North Whitehead

#47. I wouldn't say I'm a very technical [guitar] player. I'm more intuitive - it's always more about chasing an abstraction.

Annie E. Clark

#48. Cancer begins and ends with people. In the midst of scientific abstraction, it is sometimes possible to forget this one basic fact. ...

Siddhartha Mukherjee

#49. To be loved to madness
such was her great desire. Love was to her the one cordial which could drive away the eating loneliness of her days. And she seemed to long for the abstraction called passionate love more than for any particular lover.

Thomas Hardy

#50. The career of a young theoretical physicist consists of treating the harmonic oscillator in ever-increasing levels of abstraction.

Sidney Coleman

#51. 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

#52. Even the beauty of the landscape was an abstraction, like the beauty of a man in an advertisement for a cologne you could not smell.

Garth Risk Hallberg

#53. If creators of Christian culture hope to produce work that will bear good fruit, we must draw our life from the true source - our living Savior. He is real. He is present. But all too often we reduce him to an abstraction, giving him intellectual assent, but not our hearts.

Michael O'Brien

#54. We are so much the victims of abstraction that with the Earth in flames we can barely rouse ourselves to wander across the room and look at the thermostat.

Terence McKenna

#55. 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

#56. A study, by its very nature, is an abstraction.

Jane Velez-Mitchell

#57. A bit of advice, don't copy nature too closely. Art is an abstraction; as you dream amid nature, extrapolate art from it, and concentrate on what you will create as a result.

Paul Gauguin

#58. Humanists try to behave decently and honorably without any expectation of rewards or punishments in an afterlife. The creator of the universe has been unknown to us so far. We serve as well as we can to the highest abstraction of which we have some understanding, which is our community.

Kurt Vonnegut

#59. Love is not some complex, mystical abstraction. It is something accessible and human that we learn through our everyday experience, as often at times of failure as in moments of ecstasy ...

Leo Buscaglia

#60. Reflective abstraction, however, is based not on individual actions but on coordinated actions.

Jean Piaget

#61. With greater completeness and abstraction, I have attained a form filtered to its essentials.

Henri Matisse

#62. Abstraction means getting away from a visual interpretation but nearer to an emotional one.

Henry Moore

#63. There is nothing mysterious, as some have tried to maintain, about the applicability of mathematics. What we get by abstraction from something can be returned.

Raymond Louis Wilder

#64. My struggle has been to return painting to the tangible object, which is like returning the personality to touching and feeling the world around it, to offset the tendency to vagueness and abstraction. To remind people of practical activity, to suggest the sense and not to escape from the senses.

Claes Oldenburg

#65. A perfume is more than an extract it is a presence in abstraction. A perfume, for me, is a mystique.

Giorgio Armani

#66. It is easy now to communicate with people through abstraction, and particularly so in sculpture. Since the whole body reacts to its presence, people become themselves a living part of the whole.

Barbara Hepworth

#67. Abstraction generally involves implication, suggestion and mystery, rather than obvious description.

Robert Genn

#68. Abstraction has always been around, since the drawings in the caves. It exists in all cultures all over the world. I thought for a while that it was going to be the major movement. But people always drift back to realism. I guess there is a certain security in that.

Brice Marden

#69. 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

#70. Time is an absurdity. An abstraction. The only thing that matters is this moment. This moment a million times over. You have to trust me. If this moment is repeated enough, if you keep trying - and you have to keep trying - eventually you will come across the next item on your list.

Jonathan Nolan

#71. An administrator in a bureaucratic world is a man who can feel big by merging his non-entity in an abstraction. A real person in touch with real things inspires terror in him.

Marshall McLuhan

#72. Like Midas, the Rationalist is always in the unfortunate position of not being able to touch anything, without transforming it into an abstraction; he can never get a square meal of experience.

Michael Oakeshott

#73. An audience is an abstraction; it has no taste. It must depend on the only person who has (pardon, should have), the conductor.

Igor Stravinsky

#74. Persons without education certainly do not want [lack] either acuteness or strength of mind in what concerns themselves, or in things immediately within their observation; but they have no power of abstraction
they see their objects always near, never in the horizon.

William Hazlitt

#75. Every good composition is above all a work of abstraction. All good painters know this. But the painter cannot dispense with subjects altogether without his work suffering impoverishment.

Diego Rivera

#76. Such abstraction which refuses to accept the given universe of facts as the final context of validation, such "transcending" analysis of the facts in the light of their arrested and denied possibilities, pertains to the very structure of social theory.

Herbert Marcuse

#77. Science is a little bit more than a wonderful way of modelling and predicting; it's a wonderful technical abstraction. I think science is a really wonderful technical abstraction.

Bernard Beckett

#78. The job of the color photographer is to provide some level of abstraction that can take the image out of the daily.

Joel Sternfeld

#79. This extravagant dwelling, as domineering as it was distant, brought home to me the intimateconnection between tyranny and abstraction, and put me in mind of John Berger's observation that "abstraction's capacity to ignore what is real is undoubtedly where most evil begins."

Michael Jackson

#80. Red Carpet has a nice package abstraction layer that allows us to support RPMs and DEBs transparently.

Nat Friedman

#81. Almost without exception, blue refers to the domain of abstraction and immateriality.

Wassily Kandinsky

#82. There is an amount of abstraction in my movies, and sometimes they don't really understand it until the film is finished.

Michel Gondry

#83. LOVE is one kind of abstraction ...

David Levithan

#84. all thinking about human beings without Christ is unfruitful abstraction. The counterimage to the human being taken up into the form of Christ is the human being as self-creator, self-judge, and self-renewer; these people bypass their true humanity and therefore, sooner or later, destroy themselves.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer

#85. In my experience, you either have encapsulation and abstraction or you have neither. There is no middle ground.

Steve McConnell

#86. 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

#87. Before abstraction everything is one, but one like chaos; after abstraction everything is united again, but this union is a free binding of autonomous, self-determined beings. Out of a mob a society has developed, chaos has been transformed into a manifold world.

Novalis

#88. In past times when one lived in contact with nature, abstraction was easy; it was done unconsciously. Now in our denaturalized age abstraction becomes an effort.

Piet Mondrian

#89. 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

#90. Philosophy does not exist. It is nothing but an hypostatized abstraction.

R.D. Laing

#91. The desert is no longer a landscape, it is a pure form produced by the abstraction of all others.

Jean Baudrillard

#92. The only real life is the collective life of the race; individual life has no existence except as an abstraction.

Auguste Comte

#93. Behind the abstraction known as 'the markets' lurks a set of institutions designed to maximize the wealth and power of the most privileged group of people in the world, the creditor-rentier class of the First World and their junior partners in the Third.

Doug Henwood

#94. 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

#95. But we must not underestimate the potency of the mathematical process of abstraction. A surprising variety of things happen to have both magnitude and direction and to combine according to the parallelogram law; and many of them are not at all reminiscent of journeys.

Banesh Hoffmann

#96. Time is an abstraction of eternity. A glimpse, for mortals, of what could be if we spend ours wisely in life.

Dean Cavanagh

#97. Abstraction is real, probably more real than nature.

Josef Albers

#98. Somewhere, floating in a muddled abstraction beyond your existence as a generally good person, are the Externalities. Fuck 'em and God Bless 'em.

Jeremy Robert Johnson

#99. Abstraction and luxury are the guard dogs of the upper class.

Jeff Koons

#100. Remember that every science is based upon an abstraction. An abstraction is taking a point of view or looking at things under a certain aspect or from a particular angle. All sciences are differentiated by their abstraction.

Fulton J. Sheen