Quotes About Abstraction

But that is poetry, I protest. Poetry is an abstraction.

Freedom is not an abstaction, nor is a little of it enough. A little more is not enough either. Having less, being less, empoverished in freedom and rights, women then invariably have less self-respect: less self-respect than any human being needs to live a brave and honest life.

Most Amerikans do not read books--they prefer television. Academics lock books in a tangled web of mindfuck and abstraction. The notion is that there are ideas, then art, then somewhere else, unrelated, life.

Doctrines, though useful, are the product of analytical dissection; they recast the original, equivocal, historical material into abstract, less fully realized categories of meaning. In short, doctrines are not as richly meaningful as that which they are doctrines about.

But while you can always write 'spaghetti code' in a procedural language, object-oriented languages used poorly can add meatballs to your spaghetti.

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

Mankind? It is an abstraction. There are, always have been, and always will be, men and only men.

Part of what makes a theory elegant is its power to explain much while assuming little.

Nothing is more wonderful about human beings than their ability to abstract, infer, calculate, and produce rules, algorithms, and tables that enable them to work marvels.

In 'real life' everything is diluted; in the novel everything is condensed.

It is natural to think that an abstract science cannot be of much importance in affairs of human life, because it has omitted from its consideration everything of real interest.

Third, the intellect abstracts from even the quantitative features and considers only the most general ways in which a thing might be characterized Ã¢â'¬â€œ in terms of notions such as that of substance, attribute, essence, existence, etc.

First, the intellect abstracts from the individualizing features of concrete material things, but still considers them in terms of the sensible characteristics that they have in common.

Second, the intellect abstracts from even the common sensible features of things and considers only their quantitative features. Mathematics is the field of inquiry corresponding to this degree of abstraction.

Yet such abstraction, Chief! Is hard to win without much holiness.

Consciousness of self— the general realization that I exist independently of the circumstances of the moment—marks man's first great effort of abstraction; the detachment of the various spiritual activities from their function in the totality of his life and the unity of his world view is a second abstraction.

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.

Abstraction allows man to see with his mind what he cannot see physically with his eyes.

As for everything else, so for a mathematical theory: beauty can be perceived but not explained.

As for everything else, so for mathematical theory: beauty can be perceived but not explained.

Quality is a direct experience independent of and prior to intellectual abstractions.

It is not of the essence of mathematics to be conversant with the ideas of number and quantity.

For some members of the radical Left, particularly in the West, people in developing countries are an ideological abstraction, on whom fantasies of liberation are projected from a comfortable distance.

The more abstract the truth you wish to teach, the more you need to seduce the senses to it.