Quotes About Abstraction

The rule for working out prime numbers is very simple, but no one has ever worked out a simple formula for telling you whether a very big number is a prime number or what the next one will be. […] Prime numbers is what is left when you have taken all the patterns away. I think prime numbers are like life. They are very logical but you could never work out the rules, even if you spent all your time thinking about them.

Prime numbers is what is left when you have taken all the patterns away.

In a life, or a portion of a life illuminated, there's a fullness and a balance that no theory or abstraction can match. Why do people waste so much time on abstraction? The life that is given to us, that we play out, is something that you cannot any more grasp with systems and ideas than you can tame an elephant with tweezers.

The world had courage, faith, beauty, and love, and it had music, which, although not merely an abstraction, was equal to the greatest abstractions and principles – its power to lift, clarify, and carry the soul forever unmatched.

I was born with the ability to see in metaphor.

Atwater gave the boy twopence and began to bite the apple. It was green and tasted of absolutely nothing. It was like eating material in the abstract.

In everything continuous and divisible, it is possible to grasp the more, the less, and the equal, and these either in reference to the thing itself, or in relation to us.

They call it the War with the Sky." Bisesa snorted. "That's ridiculous. How can you wage war on an abstraction?" "I suspect that's the point. It means whatever you want it to mean.

I do not think it possible to convey the moral energy that went into this division between abstraction and realism, from both sides, in those years. It had an almost theological intensity, and in another stage of civilization there would certainly have been burnings at stake.

The art of number theory is so abstract that it is frighteningly easy to wander off the path of logic and be completely unaware that one has strayed into absurdity

Let us beware lest our lack of imagination impoverish the future; the future is only an abstraction for us; each of us secretly laments the absence in it of what was; but tomorrow's humankind will live the future in its flesh and in its freedom; that future will be its present, and humankind will in turn prefer it;

Both the destruction and the preservation of capitalism are meaningless slogans, but these slogans are supported by real organizations. Corresponding to each empty abstraction there is an actual human group, and any abstraction of which this is not true remains harmless.

Talk with M. Hermite. He never evokes a concrete image, yet you soon perceive that the more abstract entities are to him like living creatures.

The lesson of bells is that no work is worth finishing, so why care too deeply about anything? Years of bells will condition all but the strongest to a world that no longer offer important work to do. Bells destroy the past and future, rendering every interval the same as any other, as the abstraction of a map renders every living mountain and river the same, even though they are not. Bells inoculate each undertaking with significance.

In any conceivable method ever invented by man, an automaton which produces an object by copying a pattern, will go first from the pattern to a description to the object. It first abstracts what the thing is like, and then carries it out. It's therefore simpler not to extract from a real object its definition, but to start from the definition.

As a securely dominant species you could afford to lose touch with reality, and amuse yourselves with abstractions

Out of time we cut "days" and "nights," "summers" and "winters." We say what each part of the sensible continuum is, and all these abstract whats are concepts. The intellectual life of man consists almost wholly in his substitution of a conceptual order for the perceptual order in which his experience originally comes. —William James, "The World We Live In

We have the more hold over this world the further we withdraw from it, the less we adhere to it.

The universal view melts things into a blur

He had been present in their minds not as a man but as an idea.

Meditation is an abstraction of attention from one's self, to fix it entirely on God, it is the will insisting on His reality.

Red Carpet has a nice package abstraction layer that allows us to support RPMs and DEBs transparently.

I'd like to do a record that doesn't even reference actual places. Because I think it's kind of an open-ended concept. It doesn't have to be taken so literally.

A short story is something that I think can be intuited and envisioned and held in your mind almost at once.