Quotes About Abstraction

You can not apply mathematics as long as words still becloud reality.

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.

This paper was one of my digressions into abstract economics.

THE FOLLOWING ARGUMENT is intended to be an exercise in sociological theory. Specifically, it seeks to apply a general theoretical perspective derived from the sociology of knowledge to the phenomenon of religion. While at certain points the argument moves on levels of considerable abstraction, it never leaves (at least not intentionally) the frame of reference of the empirical discipline of sociology.

Abstraction can be a powerful tool, but it can also lead to heads buried in the sand. In

one thing that separates good programmers from bad programmers is that good programmers are more facile at jumping between layers of abstraction—they can keep the layers distinct while making changes and choose the right layer to make changes in.

In this distinctive world, elusive quantities flash at the edge of conventional logic.

She was an abstraction in an abstraction: an impossible intersection of dozens of bright panes, as if the disassembled tiles of a stained-glass window had each been set aglow and animated. She swirled before me like a school of fish.

I glanced around at all that customized abstraction: internal feedback, lucidly dreamed. "You're omnipotent in here. Desire anything, imagine anything; there it is. I'd thought it would have changed you more.

In quantum theory, words are blunt tools.

The visible world, I think, is abstract and mysterious enough.

Giovanni Sartori has distinguished two approaches to problem solving: the empirical and the rational. 15 The empirical approach is concerned with what is and what can be seen and touched, proceeding on the basis of testing and retesting and largely rejecting dogma and abstract or coherent grand designs for change. The rationalist approach, by contrast, is concerned with abstraction rather than facts, stressing the need for deductive consistency and tending to be dogmatic and definitive.

The science called 'economics' is based on an initial act of abstraction that consists in dissociating a particular category of practices, or a particular dimension of all practice, from the social order in which all human practice is immersed.

In the visual arts, particularly painting, I distrust all those abstractions, those artificial constructions. I have a very simple way of judging them: if I can do them, they are not art.

I'm mostly drawn to narratives that are difficult for me to visualize.

The Why's of suffering keep us shrouded in a seemingly bottomless void of abstraction where God is reduced to a finite ethical agent, a limited psychological personality, whose purposes measure on the same scale as ours.

I came to the destruction of volume by the use of the plane. This I accomplished by means of lines cutting the planes. But still, the plane remained too intact. So I came to making only lines and brought the colour within the lines. Now the only problem was to destroy these lines also through mutual oppositions.

My job is to return abstraction to the people: in a sense, to popularize it without lowering the bar, which is a lot easier said than done.

Por fin se había liberado de las ataduras, emancipado del mundo opresivo formado por sus padres y los que eran iguales que ellos, un mundo hecho de abstracciones, seguridad y bienestar material, un mundo en el que sentía como una dolorosa amputación la ausencia del latir puro y salvaje de la existencia. Al

Our visual cortexes are wired to quickly recognize faces and then quickly subtract massive amounts of detail from them, zeroing in on their essential message: Is this person happy? Angry? Fearful? Individual faces may vary greatly, but a smirk on one is a lot like a smirk on another. Smirks are conceptual, not pictorial. Our brains are like cartoonists - and cartoonists are like our brains, simplifying and exaggerating, subordinating facial detail to abstract comic concepts.

There was no abstraction that couldn't be tracer fire, or the smoke of black powder, or a hollow-point's flowering. The body was worldlike in the repleteness of its possibilities, and just as no part of this little world was safe from a bullet's penetration, no form in the big world had no echo in a gun.

The philosopher Elaine Scarry has observed that beauty always takes place in the particular. Cruelty, on the other hand, prefers abstraction.

Cruelty...prefers abstraction. Some have tried to resolved this gap by hunting or butchering an animal themselves, as if those experiences might somehow legitimize the endeavor of eating animals. This is very silly. Murdering someone would surely prove that you are capable of killing, but it woudln't be the most reasonable way to understand why you should or shouldn't do it.

Cruelty, on the other hand, prefers abstraction.