Quotes About Abstraction

I think we are living a life without specificity, and then our lives become abstractions.

From all of the above neither the king nor the deity is seen as lawgiver (especially given the current consensus that these are not laws). No such abstraction as "law" exists in their minds, only the practical need to administer justice. Nevertheless, the king was the primary source for legislation, typically through decrees.[22]

Wisdom, itself, is often an abstraction associated not with fact or reality but with the man who asserts it and the manner of its assertion.

Beasts abstract not.

Theoretical inquiry involves a search for regularities. It involves abstraction from the complexity of a field setting, followed by the positing of theoretical variables that underlie observed complexities.

For Plato, then, all certain knowledge requires an element of abstraction from concrete reality. Through Socrates, Plato tells us to constantly reach for the highest level of knowledge beyond mere individual examples, toward a universal standard for judgment that will give us a stronger, more confident position for acting in the world.

Complex numbers taught me on reasonable philosophy; that you can imagine anything what you don't have in real life.

Willem de Kooning is generally credited for coming out of the painterly gates strong in the forties, revolutionizing art and abstraction and reaching incredible heights by the early fifties, and then tailing off.

I have a 2-year-old son, and I know I'm dealing with a big, grand word when I can't point to the thing when I define it. Right? If he wants to know what a chair is, I can point to the chair. If he wants to know what religion is, I can't point to anything in particular. The same is true of the state.

I think that in making a genre movie, you have a really great opportunity to use abstraction to allow the audience to project their own experiences of the world into this thing. That's kind of what art is kind of all about.

If we were to study these fragments by Baudelaire according to the normal methods of psychology, we might conclude that when the poet left behind him the settings of the world, to experience the single setting of immensity, he could only have knowledge of an abstraction come true. Intimate space elaborated in this way by a poet, would be merely the pendant of the outside space of geometricians, who seek infinite space with no other sign than infinity itself.

the concept of eternity must not be grasped as if it were suspended time, or in any case not in the sense that eternity would come after time, for this would turn eternity into the future, in other words into a moment of time. And the concept of eternity must also not be understood in the sense of a negation of time, so that it would be merely an abstraction of time. For time in its concept is, like the concept itself generally, eternal, and therefore also absolute presence.

My paintings do not have a center, but depend on the same amount of interest throughout.

Abstract painting seeks to be a pure pictorial language, and thus attempts to escape the essential impurity of all languages: the recourse to signs or forms that have meanings shared by everyone.

The science of mathematics treats its object as though it were something abstracted mentally, whereas it is not abstract in reality.

It's only when all one knows of life is abstracted and used as an underlining statement of significant patterning that you have what is both beautiful and permanent.

Time is an absurdity. An abstraction. The only thing that matters is this moment.

Specificity of time and place drop away and one starts to think about the picture, as much as what it is of.

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

The abstract analysis of the world by mathematics and physics rests on the concepts of space and time.

As we shall see throughout this book, the unifying powers of group theory are so colossal that historian of mathematics Eric Temple Bell (1883-1960) once commented, When ever groups disclosed themselves, or could be introduced, simplicity crystallized out of comparative chaos.

It's easier to imagine the death of one person than those of a hundred or a thousand. When multiplied, suffering becomes abstract. It's not easy to be moved by abstract things.

Aquellas obras exentas de alguna dosis de violencia me resultaban irreales (he preferido siempre que las novelas finjan lo real así como otros prefieren que finjan lo irreal) y la irrealidad suele aburrirme mortalmente.

Es más fácil imaginar la muerte de una persona que la de cien o mil —murmuró el barón—. Multiplicado, el sufrimiento se vuelve abstracto.