Quotes About Abstraction

The Substitute Word concept can be applied to any seemingly abstract material. Basically, it's this: When you hear or see a word or phrase that seems abstract or intangible to you, think of something—anything—that sounds like, or reminds you of, the abstract material and can be pictured in your mind.

Artists are those who can evade the verbose.

But actually time isn't a straight line. It doesn't ave a shape. In all senses of the term, it doesn't have any form. But since we can't picture something without form in our minds, for the sake of convenience we understand it as a straight line. At this point, humans are the only ones who can make that sort of conceptual substitution.

I have been writing fairy tales for as long as I can remember. Not much has changed in terms of my natural attraction to the narrative techniques of fairy tales. My appreciation of them in the traditional stories has deepened, especially of flat and unadorned language, intuitive logic, abstraction, and everyday magic.

We call those works of art concrete that came into being on the basis of their inherent resources and rules - without external borrowing from natural phenomena, without transforming those phenomena, in other words: not by abstraction.

esta elaboración se apoya en la apertura hacia los objetos transicionales, en un principio tan concretos como el chupete y el osito y, con el tiempo, tan abstractos como la amistad, la música, y otros modos en que el individuo recupera la experiencia de ilusión.

A mathematician is a person who can find analogies between theorems a better mathematician is one who can see analogies between proofs and the best mathematician can notice analogies between theories.

Durant cette heure, j'avais vu à découvert le secret éternel de tout grand art et même, à vrai dire, de toute production humaine : la concentration, le rassemblement de toutes les forces, de tous les sens, la faculté de s'abstraire de soi-même, de s'abstraire du monde, qui est le propre de tous les artistes. J'avais appris quelque chose pour la vie.

Man has such a predilection for systems and abstract deductions that he is ready to distort the truth intentionally he is ready to deny the evidence of his senses only to justify his logic.

What are numbers? What is the nature of arithmetical truth?

Geometry is not true, it is advantageous.

Two elements are needed to form a truth - a fact and an abstraction

If you seek just a little truth, as most, you should not ignore abstract forms, the basis from which all short-lived experiences we call reality springs.

The whole body of what is now called moral or ethical truth existed in the golden age as abstract science. Or, if we prefer, we may say that the laws of Nature are the purest morality.

But man is so addicted to systems and to abstract conclusions that he is prepared deliberately to distort the truth, to close his eyes and ears, but justify his logic at all cost.

Like Midas, the Rationalist is always in the unfortunate position of not being able to touch anything, without transforming it into an abstraction; he can never get a square meal of experience.

But not for him. "This is the crux of science," he'd say with enthusiasm. "All science is modeling. In all science you are abstracting from nature. The question is: is it a useful abstraction." Useful, to Bob Glass, meant: Does it help solve a problem?

The computer programmer creates the only path available to the computer user; the effect of his decisions on others is masked by their abstraction.

to find the phenomenon and then explain it in a way that applies to other situations

Part of the appeal of hamburgers and nuggets is that their boneless abstractions allow us to forget we're eating animals.

Banality depends on memory, as do irony and abstraction and boredom, three other defenses the educated mind deploys against experience so that it can get through the day without being continually, exhaustingly astonished.

If the fact that brutes abstract not be made the distinguishing property of that sort of animal, I fear a great many of those that pass for men must be reckoned into their number.

Toute abstraction est si dure à accepter que notre premier réflexe est de la refuser, d'autant plus si elle s'inscrit à contre-courant de ce que nous avons toujours pensé.»

Began another big one, more abstract, written from the bathtub: