Top 100 Quotes About Abstractions
#1. If chimpanzees have consciousness, if they are capable of abstractions, do they not have what until now has been described as 'human rights'? How smart does a chimp have to be before killing him constitutes murder?
Carl Sagan
#3. As a movement Cubism had consistently stopped short of complete abstraction. Heretics such as Delaunay had painted pure abstractions but in so doing had deserted Cubism.
Alfred H. Barr Jr.
#4. When novels deal in abstractions, they generally go off the rails.
Philipp Meyer
#5. No,' Rambert said bitterly, 'you can't understand. You're using the language of reason, not of the heart; you live in a world of ... of abstractions.
Albert Camus
#6. You can deny, if you like, nearly all abstractions: justice, beauty, truth, goodness, mind, God. You can deny seriousness, but not play.
Johan Huizinga
#7. We must not be frightened nor cajoled into accepting evil as deliverance from evil. We must go on struggling to be human, though monsters of abstractions police and threaten us.
Robert Hayden
#8. Unk, standing at a porthole, wept quietly. He was weeping for love, for family, for friendship, for truth, for civilization. The things he wept for were all abstractions, since his memory could furnish few faces or artifacts with which his imagination might fashion a passion play.
Kurt Vonnegut
#9. Part of the appeal of hamburgers and nuggets is that their boneless abstractions allow us to forget we're eating animals.
Michael Pollan
#10. Love is like this, Faye thinks now. We love people because they love us. It's narcissistic. It's best to be perfectly clear about this and not let abstractions like fate and destiny muddle the issue. Peggy, after all, could have picked any boy in the school.
Nathan Hill
#11. The spontaneous tendency to invoke a Final Cause in explanation of every difficulty is characteristic of metaphysical philosophy. It arises from a general tendency towards the impersonation of abstractions which is visible throughout History.
George Henry Lewes
#12. When Philosophy with its abstractions paints grey in grey, the freshness and life of youth has gone, the reconciliation is not a reconciliation in the actual, but in the ideal world.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
#13. When imagination fails, compassion and humaneness dwindle and atrophy along with it. Unleavened by imagination, the variety and richness of life turn into flat abstractions; people become objects to be manipulated
with the social consequences we know all too well.
Lloyd Alexander
#14. Quality is a direct experience independent of and prior to intellectual abstractions.
Robert M. Pirsig
#15. The fundamental concepts of physical science, it is now understood, are abstractions, framed by our mind, so as to bring order to an apparent chaos of phenomena.
William Cecil Dampier
#16. Communism has served us ill in having us swap a living brotherhood for what looks to have the features of the coldest of all chill abstractions.
Aime Cesaire
#17. Even at its most perceptive, sociology deals in abstractions.
Richard Russo
#18. Mattia was startled to find that he still had instincts, buried beneath the dense network of thoughts and abstractions that had woven itself around him.
Paolo Giordano
#19. The goods of fidelity, for example, are plain and concrete to the man who has not strayed, but they are faint, like mathematical abstractions, to the one who is addicted to other men's wives.
J. Budziszewski
#20. true biblical faith leaves you very vulnerable to reality, because now there is no place to hide. No wonder we prefer abstractions over the actual! We can hide behind abstractions, but Incarnation leaves you both utterly exposed and constantly invited. incorporation
Richard Rohr
#21. The problem with abstractions (like reports and documents) is that they create illusions of agreement. A hundred people can read the same words, but in their heads, they're imagining a hundred different things.
Jason Fried
#22. Abstractions about right and wrong, whether they are as old as Thou Shalt Not Kill or as modern as Do Your Own Thing, often serve only to confuse and weaken genuine moral decision.
Ursula K. Le Guin
#23. I have a hard time with abstractions. I always go to the personal.
Janet Fitch
#24. The best way to combat racism is to have blacks and whites relate to one another as individuals, rather than as racial abstractions ... It becomes much harder to make a nasty generalization about another group after you have spent time in the home of one if its members.
Dennis Prager
#25. But everything takes a different shape when we pass from abstractions to reality. In the former, everything must be subject to optimism, and we must imagine the one side as well as the other striving after perfection and even attaining it. Will this ever take place in reality?
Carl Von Clausewitz
#26. On the ward there was hurt and pain so big and so deep that speech could not express it. I had been interested in philosophy, and suddenly philosophy came alive for me, for here the basic questions of human existence were not abstractions: they were embodied in human suffering
Frank X. Barron
#27. Lying mouth to mouth, kiss to kiss in the pillow dark, loin to loin in unbelievable surrendering sweetness so distant from all our mental fearful abstractions it makes you wonder why men have termed God antisexual somehow (p. 148)
Jack Kerouac
#28. We must be careful not to confuse data with the abstractions we use to analyse them.
William James
#29. This is the postmodern desert inhabited by people who are, in effect, consuming themselves in the form of images and abstractions through which their desires, sense of identity, and memories are replicated and then sold back to them as products
Larry McCaffrey
#30. All war propaganda consists, in the last resort, in subsituting diabolical abstractions for human beings. Similarly,those who defend war have invented a pleasant sounding vocabulary of abstractions in which to describe the process of mass murder.
Aldous Huxley
#31. Psychologically, the teaching of abstractions first is wrong. Indeed, a thorough understanding of the concrete must precede the abstract.
Morris Kline
#32. At that point it certainly would be called abstract. That is to say, you had a model and there'd be one or two or three people there drawing the model but otherwise you had abstractions all around the room, even though the model was in front of you.
Lee Krasner
#33. Historically and politically, the petit-bourgeois is the key to the century. The bourgeois and proletariat classes have become abstractions: the petite-bourgeoisie, in contrast, is everywhere, you can see it everywhere, even in the areas of the bourgeois and the proletariat, what's left of them.
Roland Barthes
#34. Because we tend to equate intelligence with language
particularly the ability to use language to think and communicate abstractions
it is natural to conclude that animals are, on the whole, a lot less intelligent than we are.
Linda Bender
#35. The Seasons Difference is a suave and urbane comedy about several immense abstractions - faith, innocence, loneliness, and love.
Orville Prescott
#36. 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
#37. People who use the sensing mode are engrossed in what is around them, look only for facts, and find it less interesting to deal with ideas or abstractions. Intuitive people like to dwell in the unseen world of ideas and possibilities, distrustful of physical reality. Whatever
Tom Butler-Bowdon
#38. Their curses were not aimed at any definite target: they swore at such abstractions as God, the Officers, the Mothers of Others, with more music than meaning.
Mario Vargas-Llosa
#39. Life is filled with abstractions, and the only way to make heads or tails of it is going through intuition.
David Lynch
#40. Objects hide their data behind abstractions and expose functions that operate on that data. Data structure expose their data and have no meaningful functions.
Robert C. Martin
#41. There is an incredibly large spectrum of possible causes for program bugs, including simple typos, "thinkos," hidden limitations of underlying abstractions, and outright bugs in abstractions or their implementation.
Guido Van Rossum
#42. An unbearable reality, combined with the impossibility to change it, tends to lead to abstractions for abstraction's sake, and unreality becomes more realistic than reality itself, more true, more convincing, simply because it looks at you with the eyes of justice.
Romain Gary
#43. My father painted, well into his 80s, what he called hard edge abstractions.It's really cool.
Lewis Black
#44. We did not adopt socialism out of books, abstractions, humanism, or pity, but rather out of need for the Arab working class is the mover of history in this period.
Michel Aflaq
#46. The intellectual is engage-he is pledged, committed, enlisted. What everyone else is willing to admit, namely that ideas and abstractions are of signal importance in human life, he imperatively feels.
Richard Hofstadter
#47. It will be seen that we contemplate a time when man's will shall be law to the physical world, and he shall no longer be deterredby such abstractions as time and space, height and depth, weight and hardness, but shall indeed be the lord of creation.
Henry David Thoreau
#48. No one has ever seen the self. It has no visible shape, nor does it occupy measurable space. It is an abstraction, like other abstractions equally elusive: the individual, the mind, the society
Irving Howe
#49. Life ain't a concept. Music is not a concept. My titles are poetic abstractions of something that is with me all the time, not necessarily in music, but in life. Everybody's life.
Merzbow
#50. The learning we received only tended to obscure our vision. From the day we went to school we learned nothing; on the contrary, we were made obtuse, we were wrapped in a fog of words and abstractions.
Henry Miller
#51. Mandelstam's style is not singular. He could be stately and traditional, ribald and funny, hectic, elegiac. He could handle abstractions and ideas as well as Pope or Browning but then be so musical that other poems approach pure sound.
Christian Wiman
#52. I'd say that my profession ends where architectural thinking ends - architectural thinking in terms of thinking about programs and organizational structure. These abstractions play a role in many other disciplines, and those disciplines are now defining their 'architectures' as well.
Rem Koolhaas
#53. God's providence is never characterized
in broad generalities or pious abstractions but always in the particular, in the personal, in the recognition of grace in an unlikely time, at an unlikely place. Who could have anticipated ravens?
Eugene H. Peterson
#54. Underneath an artist's preoccupations with sex, society, religion, etc. (all the staple abstractions that allow the forebrain to chatter) there is a soul tortured beyond endurance by the lack of tenderness in the world.
Lawrence Durrell
#55. I do not write for a select minority, which means nothing to me, nor for that adulated platonic entity known as 'The Masses'. Both abstractions, so dear to the demagogue, I disbelieve in. I write for myself and for my friends, and I write to ease the passing of time.
Jorge Luis Borges
#56. I knew from my years of writing about NSA abuses that it can be hard to generate serious concern about secret state surveillance: invasion of privacy and abuse of power can be viewed as abstractions, ones that are difficult to get people to care about viscerally.
Glenn Greenwald
#57. All non-trivial abstractions, to some degree, are leaky.
Joel Spolsky
#58. We are concerned with similar states of consciousness and relationship to the world ... If previous abstractions paralleled the scientific and objective preoccupations of our times, ours are finding a pictoral equivalent for man's new knowledge and consciousness of his more complex inner self.
Mark Rothko
#59. I think we are living a life without specificity, and then our lives become abstractions.
Terry Tempest Williams
#60. Equality today means "sameness," rather than "oneness." It is the sameness of abstractions, of the men who work in the same jobs, who have the same amusements, who read the same newspapers, who have the same feelings and the same ideas.
Erich Fromm
#61. (The Francophile and radical John Stuart Mill had noted, not long after the Commune fell, in a letter to an English union leader, "an infirmity of the French mind" - that of "being led away by phrases, and treating abstractions as if they were realities which have a will and exert active power.")
Anonymous
#62. Every nervous system creates its own "reality," minute by minute - we live inside a "bubble" of neural abstractions which we identify with reality. You can make this neurological fact into conscious experience, and you will never be bored or depressed again.
Robert Anton Wilson
#63. The general rule for refactoring into a new inheritance hierarchy is to arrange code so that you can promote abstractions rather than demote concretions.
Sandi Metz
#64. Of the many forms of false culture, a premature converse with abstractions is perhaps the most likely to prove fatal to the growth of a masculine vigour of intellect.
George Boole
#65. Those who are long on logic, definitions, abstractions, and formulas are frequently short on a sense of the concrete.
Flannery O'Connor
#66. It [destroying Twin Towers] was a leap into another realm - the realm of crazy abstractions and mythological generalities, involving people who have hijacked Islam for their own purposes. It's important not to fall into that trap and to try to respond with a metaphysical retaliation of some sort.
Edward Said
#67. I have painted portraits that to me are almost photographic. I remember hesitating to show the paintings, they looked so real to me. But they have passed into the world as abstractions - no one seeing what they are.
Georgia O'Keeffe
#68. For the Warrior of the Light, there are no abstractions.
Paulo Coelho
#69. 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
#70. It is interesting to observe how real the object remains, in spite of all abstractions.
Paul Klee
#71. 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
#72. That's what it is that you rehearse - the making of music, not the playing of notes as abstractions.
Sarah Caldwell
#73. Viewed in abstractions, love is the same thing for everybody. It thrills the same way, and devastates with bloodless efficiency.
Craig Lancaster
#74. Abstractions about capital punishment were one thing, but the details of systematically killing someone who is not a threat are completely different.
Bryan Stevenson
#75. The beginning of human knowledge is through the senses, and the fiction writer begins where the human perception begins. He appeals through the senses, and you cannot appeal through the senses with abstractions.
Flannery O'Connor
#76. The paradox is now fully established that the utmost abstractions are the true weapons with which to control our thought of concrete fact.
Alfred North Whitehead
#77. I cannot worship the abstractions of virtue: she only charms me when she addresses herself to my heart, speaks through the love from which she springs.
Reinhold Niebuhr
#78. To me, a story can be both concrete and abstract, or a concrete story can hold abstractions. And abstractions are things that really can't be said so well with words.
David Lynch
#79. It's a mystical quality of music, that music isn't really concrete, and it's communicating abstractions about imaginary worlds. At least, my music's like that. It's not real. It's unreal, it's all fabrication. To write a song about Obama would suddenly break the spell.
Sufjan Stevens
#80. The pursuit of truth is just a polite name for the intellectual's favorite pastime of substituting simple and therefore false abstractions for the living complexities of reality.
Aldous Huxley
#81. Hinduism advises such people not to try to think of God as the supreme instance of abstractions like being or consciousness, and instead to think of God as the archetype of the noblest reality they encounter in the natural world.
Huston Smith
#82. Logicians may reason about abstractions. But the great mass of men must have images. The strong tendency of the multitude in all ages and nations to idolatry can be explained on no other principle.
Thomas B. Macaulay
#83. Policymakers think that if they get the abstractions right, that will drive behavior in the desired direction. But the world happens in real time.
Sendhil Mullainathan
#84. To think is to forget differences, generalize, make abstractions.
Angela Harris
#85. Perhaps the efforts of the true poets, founders, religions, literatures, all ages, have been, and ever will be, our time and times to come, essentially the same - to bring people back from their present strayings and sickly abstractions, to the costless, average, divine, original concrete.
Walt Whitman
#86. I care about strangers when they're abstractions, but I feel almost nothing when they're literally in front of me.
Chuck Klosterman
#87. Where jargon turns living issues into abstractions, and where jargon ends by competing with jargon, people don't have causes. They only have enemies.
V.S. Naipaul
#88. While illusion distorts reality for a moment, error can reign for a millennia in abstractions, throw its iron yoke over whole peoples and stifle the noblest impulses of humanity; those it cannot deceive are left in chains by those it has, by its slaves.
Arthur Schopenhauer
#89. The degeneracy of mankind is distinguished from its uprise by the dominance of chill abstractions, divorced from aesthetic content.
Alfred North Whitehead
#90. Literature expresses itself by abstractions, whereas painting, by means of drawing and colour, gives concrete shape to sensations and perceptions.
Paul Cezanne
#91. To see how to make something more general, you need to start with something concrete. In particular, you need to understand the specifics of a particular domain to discover the right abstractions.
Alexander A. Stepanov
#92. Isolated material particles are abstractions, their properties being definable and observable only through their interaction with other systems .
Niels Bohr
#93. There's something mathematically satisfying about music: notes fit together and harmony and all that. And mathematics has to do with abstractions and making connections.
Tom Lehrer
#94. To make someone an icon is to make him an abstraction, and abstractions are incapable of vital communication with living people.
David Foster Wallace
#95. In 'Self Comes to Mind' I pay a lot of attention to simple creatures without brains or minds, because those 'cartooned abstractions of who we are' operate on precisely the same principles that we do.
Antonio Damasio
#96. Hierarchy is a kind of order of abstractions.
Grady Booch
#97. If more people had put their fellow human beings before abstractions last century, we shouldn't be where we are now.
Brian Aldiss
#98. Gnosis is lived upon facts, withers away in abstractions, and is difficult to find even in the noblest of thoughts.
Samael Aun Weor
#99. In retrospect I can see that my desire to create abstractions has become more and more radical. Art should not be delivering a report on reality, but should be looking at what's behind something.
Andreas Gursky
#100. Meditation is the use of symbols, not abstractions. A symbol is something alive. It is a hyphen between one reality and another.
Frederick Lenz
