Quotes About Abstraction

Pure drawing is an abstraction. Drawing and colour are not distinct, everything in nature is coloured.

For me, music is pure abstraction.

I'm endlessly intrigued by stories, and I love helping someone to formulate his or her story. I can drift off when I'm reading pure abstraction, but the narratives of human lives hold my attention every time.

There is still a difference between something and nothing, but it is purely geometrical and there is nothing behind the geometry.

The essence of mathematics lies in its freedom.

In fact, if we consider an equation to consist of an infinite number of terms, there are no ultimate equations!

A lot of my work is about text taken to the point of abstraction.

I'm a formalist. I'm interested in the history of painting.

Those who tell you that the territorial question is an abstraction, that you can never colonize another territory without the African slavetrade, are both deaf and blind to the history of the last sixty years.

Mathematics is a place where you can do things which you can't do in the real world.

The algorithm has some kind of disembodied 'existence' which is quite apart from any realization of that algorithm in physical terms.

If you come from mathematics, as I do, you realize that there are many problems, even classical problems, which cannot be solved by computation alone

It is in mathematics that our thinking processes have their purest form.

No hay en esta idea-forma del cuadrado nada personal ni evolutivo. Escapa, por emplear nuestro lenguaje moderno, de las variaciones subjetivas. El cuadrado de Pedro no difiere en nada del cuadrado de Pablo o de Diego. Única y objetiva, esta idea-forma es la misma para todos. Frente a millones de cosas cuadradas —existentes, desaparecidas o por venir—, existe una sola idea-forma de cuadrado y solo una.

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.

The odd belief prevails in our culture that a thing or experience is not real if we cannot make it mathematical, and somehow it must be real if we can reduce it to numbers. But this means making an abstraction out of it - mathematics is the abstract par excellence, which is indeed its glory and the reason for its great usefulness.

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.

Math is sometimes called the science of patterns.

The longer you look at an object, the more abstract it becomes, and, ironically, the more real.

Roughly speaking: objects are colourless

Dalle vette nuvolose delle sue astrazioni il signor Anselmo lasciava spesso precipitar così, come valanghe, i suoi pensieri. La ragione, il nesso, l'opportunità di essi rimanevano lassù, tra le nuvole, dimodochè difficilmente a chi lo ascoltava riusciva di capirci qualche cosa.

As the legal scholar Frederick Schauer has observed, "painting with a broad brush" is "an often inevitable and frequently desirable dimension of our decision-making lives.

Another characteristic of mathematical thought is that it can have no success where it cannot generalize.

I never saw as clearly as with Artaud what the meaning of poetry is: it is an abstraction, to match allegorical patterns.