Quotes About Abstraction

We talk so abstractly about poetry because all of us are usually bad poets.

A nation goes to pieces when it confounds its duty with the general concept of duty. Nothing works a more complete and penetrating disaster than every impersonal duty, every sacrifice before the Moloch of abstraction.

Remember that every science is based upon an abstraction. An abstraction is taking a point of view or looking at things under a certain aspect or from a particular angle. All sciences are differentiated by their abstraction.

The more clearly a man understands anything, the more readily he can summarize it in a few words.

Abstraction is the condition of the science of metaphysics, but in no way is its content.

Any event or group of events may be viewed from different degrees of abstraction. A man jumps from a bridge. The psychologists make abstraction from everything except the mental state which prompted the suicide; the biologists abstract from everything except the dying organism; while the physicists are interested in the man, not as mind, or as organism, but as a falling body.

For the Angelic Doctor, the reason of conceptual knowledge is just the contrary! It is not his distance from the animal that renders abstraction necessary; it is his distance from God. Abstraction is not a condition of a push from below; it is a result of a fall from above. Abstraction is necessary because our intellect is imperfect. This is the fundamental reason.

The physicist takes water, abstracts its quantitatively measurable aspects, reaches results about these aspects, and ignores the rest.

Do mathematics have a relation to reality or are they only a mathematical symbol?

In the 'Nude Descending a Staircase,' I wanted to create a static image of movement: movement is an abstraction, a deduction articulated within the painting, without our knowing if a real person is or isn't descending an equally real staircase.

Mental illness, of course, is not literally a 'thing' - or physical object - and hence it can 'exist' only in the same sort of way in which other theoretical concepts exist.

An idea is always a generalization, and generalization is a property of thinking. To generalize means to think.

A set is a Many that allows itself to be thought of as a One.

To those who have exhausted politics, nothing remains but abstract thought.

Female nudes were not meant to titillate the viewer with their sensuality but to give physical form to abstractions such as ideal beauty or chaste love.

Man as an Idea in neoplatonist religion is again an abstraction, less a monster and more a bad joke. The religious idea of man is of a bodiless being who works to undo his flesh, deny his appetites, and to rise above the ordinary requirements of the body. This abstraction has a horror of the material world as a kind of fatal allure seeking to corrupt his soul. But no man finds himself more beset by lust than the man who tries to deny he is a man.

Nada de filosofías, nada de finalidades trascendentes, ni de abstracciones sensibilizadas, humanizadas y universalizadas. Eso, estoy seguro, hiere vuestros tímpanos delicados hechos para la música y el amor.

The essence of mathematics is not to make simple things complicated, but to make complicated things simple.

what death is, and the fact that, if a man looks at it in itself, and by the abstractive power of reflection resolves into their parts all the things which present themselves to the imagination in it, he will then consider it to be nothing else than an operation of nature;

Controlling complexity is the essence of computer programming.

What I aim at is an image with a minimum of information and markers, that has no reference to a given time or place.

Time is an abstraction which, on earth, exists only for the human brain it has evolved.

Because we cannot deal with the many as individuals, we sometimes try to simplify the many into an abstraction called the mass. Because we cannot deal with the complexity of the present, we often over-ride it and live in a simplified dream of the future. Because we cannot solve our own problems right here at home, we talk about problems out there in the world. An escape process goes on from the intolerable burden we have placed upon ourselves.

My novels are high concept. I guess big ideas interest me more than, say, the minutiae of domestic life.