Quotes About Abstraction

Fundamental philosophic ideas are almost always profoundly controversial. They are not bromides; they are not self-evident, unless it's like "A is A." They involve tremendous abstraction and tremendous complexity. And therefore, if you find that you can zip them off in one or two sentences that absolutely no one could ever question, the chances are very strong that you did something wrong, that you missed out on what this idea actually says.

To approach the spiritual in art, one will make as little use as possible of reality, because reality is opposed to the spiritual.

The supreme goal of all theory is to make the irreducible basic elements as simple and as few as possible without having to surrender the adequate representation of a simple datum of experience.

The creative principle [of science] resides in mathematics.

A scientific theory should be as simple as possible, but no simpler

Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler

Reality deals in specifics under the guise of generalities. Literature does the contrary...

Generalities are intellectually necessary evils.

A whole population of strangers inhabited and shaped that little body, lived in that mind and controlled its wishes, dictated its thoughts...The name was an abstraction, a title arbitrarily given, like France or England, to a collection, never long the same, of many individuals who were born, lived, and died within him, as the inhabitants of a country appear and disappear, but keep alive in their passage the identity of the nation to which they belong.

our perceptions of the external world are habitually clouded by the verbal notions in terms of which we do our thinking. We are for ever attempting to convert things into signs for the more intelligible abstractions of our own invention. But in doing so, we rob these things of a great deal of their native thinghood.

We are forever attempting to convert things into signs for the more intelligible abstractions of our own invention. But in doing so, we rob these things of a great deal of their native thinghood.

Plato seems to have made the enormous, the grotesque mistake of separating Being from becoming and identifying it with the mathematical abstraction of the Idea. He could never, poor fellow, have seen a bunch of flowers shining with their own inner light and all but quivering under the pressure of the significance with which they were charged; could never have perceived that what rose and iris and carnation so intensely signified was nothing more, and nothing less, than what they were.

Remember—all system diagrams are simplifications of the real world.

The … goal of all theory is to make the … basic elements as simple and as few as possible without having to surrender the adequate representation of … experience. —Albert Einstein,1 physicist

A televangelist or president blessing troops in the name of God somehow is reminiscent of a neo-Darwinist laying the blame for genocides on irrational religion, smugly sure of being inured from the same while claiming a kind of amoral immortality for the gene, that veritable Platonic abstraction, that chemical instantiation of eternal life going on indefinitely as the real world of life, which it produces, dies around it.

It is terrible to destroy a person's picture of himself in the interests of truth or some other abstraction.

It is terrible to destroy a person's picture of himself in the interests of truth or some other abstraction.

Really crazy stuff. I think they call it abstract math. What he created was usually beyond me, even conceptually.

As far as the propositions of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain; and as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality. —Albert Einstein (1879–1955)

La observación del yo coloca a quien la ejerce en un cuerpo correlacionado de mayor abstracción que el yo identificado con cualquiera de sus contenidos. De hecho, la posibilidad de percatarse de los contenidos de los pensamientos, sin identificarse con ellos, es acceder a un cuerpo correlacionado de mayor jerarquía.

I want to say my life inspires my lyrics, but I also try to abstract them as much as possible because I don't want to refer to my life explicitly. I'm definitely really embarrassed by my lyrics.

Fiction's nice. Fiction lets you select and simplify.

But it's possible to be wry and somewhat skeptical about the tedious, expensive process of saint-making without losing sight of the person at the center. Without saints, sanctity might be considered only as an abstraction. Saints help us see how a spiritual life can be lived in many different ways and under many different social and historical circumstances.

Time isn't made of anything. It is an abstraction. Just a meaning that we impose upon motion.