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Quotes About Abstraction

Cloudiness what is cloudiness, is it a lining, is it a roll, is it melting.
~ Gertrude Stein
She always says that americans can understand spaniards. That they are the only two western nations that can realize abstraction. That in americans it expresses itself b disembodiedness, in literature and machinery, in Spain by ritual so abstract that it does not connect itself with anything but ritual.
~ Gertrude Stein
I've learnt over the years to always be thinking of titles and ideas that I try to put across with just a couple of words. It's the difficult part when you're writing things that are basically abstract.
~ Jon Hopkins
Good general theory does not search for the maximum generality, but for the right generality.
~ Saunders Mac Lane
Being a good lead is all about switching hats: knowing which level of abstraction to work at to solve a problem. It's rarely a question of intelligence; instead, it's picking the right perspective to use on a particular challenge.
~ Scott Berkun
I paint - I tend more to abstraction - but not as much as I would like to because of time. I would love to do sculpture - I've toyed with the idea of fitting in a sculpture course.
~ Lily Cole
He was a poet with a rough skin: one whose sturdiness was more the result of external circumstances than of intrinsic nature. Too kindly constituted to be very provident, he was yet not imprudent. He had a quiet humorousness of disposition, not out of keeping with a frequent melancholy, the general expression of his countenance being one of abstraction. Like Walt Whitman he felt as his years increased— 'I foresee too much; it means more than I thought.
~ Mark Twain
that man is a reality, mankind an abstraction; that men cannot be treated as units in operations of political arithmetic because they behave like the symbols for zero and the infinite, which dislocate all mathematical operations; that the end justifies the means only within very narrow limits; that ethics is not a function of social utility, and charity not a petty bourgeois sentiment but the gravitational force which keeps civilization in its orbit.
~ Arthur Koestler
The highest, i.e., the most general concepts, are the poorest; ultimately these are just empty shells, as, e.g., being, essence, thing, becoming, ect. - incidentally, whatever could philosophical systems produce when they are merely spun out of these same concepts and have as their matter only such empty shells of thought? They must be infinitely empty and poor, and therefore, turn out to be tedious and suffocating.
~ Arthur Schopenhauer
just because universal concepts result only from thinking away and leaving out actual and existing determinations, and are therefore the emptier the more universal they are, the use of this procedure is limited to the elaboration of knowledge already acquired.
~ Arthur Schopenhauer
Abstract reasoning serves rather to fix the immediate cognition of the understanding for reason by setting it down in abstract concepts, that is, by making it clear,e i.e. putting it into a state to be interpreted for others, to make it meaningful.f –
~ Arthur Schopenhauer
Il ne nous est pas parmi de parler de raison absolue, et il n'existe pas plus une raison en général qu'il n'existe un triangle en général, si ce n'est sous forme de raison abstraite, obtenue discursivement par la pensée et qui, à titre de représentation extraite d'une représentation, n'est qu'un moyen d'embrasser par l'esprit beaucoup de chose en une seule
~ Arthur Schopenhauer
To satisfy themselves with this, they gladly grasp at words, especially those which denote indefinite, very abstract, and unusual concepts difficult to explain, such, for example, as infinite and finite, sensuous and supersensuous, the Idea of being, Ideas of reason, the Absolute
~ Arthur Schopenhauer
In his most important and most extraordinary work, a mere dozen or so pages long, he sought to demonstrate that even the most seemingly abstract, sublimely theoretical, mathematicized achievements of science have in reality moved only a step or two away from a prehistoric, coarsely sensory-based, anthropomorphic understanding of the world around us.
~ Stanis?aw Lem
I'm not suggesting that neural networks are easy. You need to be an expert to make these things work. But that expertise serves you across a broader spectrum of applications. In a sense, all of the effort that previously went into feature design now goes into architecture design and loss function design and optimization scheme design. The manual labor has been raised to a higher level of abstraction.
~ Stefano Soatto
Music, in the precision of its form and the mathematical tyranny of its laws, escapes into an eternity of abstraction and an absurd sublime that is everywhere and nowhere at once.
~ Stephen Fry
String theory is rather like plumbing, in a way.
~ Stephen Hawking
In Darwins post-platonische werelds is de variatie de fundamentele werkelijkheid en veranderen berekende gemiddelden in abstracties. We blijven echter de voorkeur geven aan het oudere en tegengestelde standpunt: we zien variatie nog steeds als een massa onlogische toevalligheden, die hoofdzakelijk van waarde is omdat zo'n spreiding te gebruiken is voor de berekening van een gemiddelde, hetgeen we dan beschouwen als iets wat een essentie nog het best benadert.
~ Stephen Jay Gould
The problem is not one of globalization, but one of generalization.
~ Jonar Nader
Instead of attention being directed to people and what war would do to their lives, it was turned to the abstraction of the nation. The survival of the nation in the evolutionary struggle, the refusal to accept an insult to the nation, the avoidance of the nation being humiliated or dishonoured, seemed of supreme importance. Nations as imaginary people were put before the real people who made them up.
~ Jonathan Glover
Time is an absurdity. An abstraction. The only thing that matters is this moment. This moment a million times over. You have to trust me. If this moment is repeated enough, if you keep trying — and you have to keep trying — eventually you will come across the next item on your list.
~ Jonathan Nolan
A model is a selectively simplified and consciously structured form of knowledge.
~ Eric Evans
In the old waterfall method, the business experts talk to the analysts, and analysts digest and abstract and pass the result along to the programmers, who code the software. This approach fails because it completely lacks feedback.
~ Eric Evans
the model is not the diagram.
~ Eric Evans