Quotes About Abstraction

I've been doing a lot of abstract painting lately, extremely abstract. No brush, no paint, no canvas, I just think about it.

I always felt that a painted edge between two colors was a depiction somehow.

Even now, missing Earth, he felt sympathy only for those aboard Gypsy, those orphaned, damaged, disaffected, dispossessed, Aspergerish souls whose anger at that great abstraction, The World, was more truly an anger at all those fortunate enough to be unlike them. We were all so young. How can you be so young, and so hungry for, and yet so empty of life?

Metaphor creates a kind of conceptual synesthesia, in which we understand one concept in the context of another.

Algebra is the metaphysics of arithmetic.

For a moment he seemed impressed with the speaking loneliness of the scene, or rather with the complete abstraction from all its compass of the sights and sounds of man.

Children begin with detail, and learn up to the general; they begin with the contiguous, and gradually comprehend the universal. The boy seemed to have begun with the generals of life, and never to have concerned himself with the particulars. To him the houses, the willows, the obscure fields beyond, were apparently regarded not as brick residences, pollards, meadows; but as human dwellings in the abstract, vegetation, and the wide dark world.

something to be attained by special virtuous techniques, the less real it becomes. As it becomes less real, it recedes further into the distance of abstraction, futurity, unattainability. The

film and calculus, both pornographies of flight.

That, indeed, the Home Front is something of a fiction and lie, designed, not too subtly, to draw them apart, to subvert love in favor of work, abstraction, required pain, bitter death.

My book might be seen as a search for lower consciousness, an attempt to remove the patina of abstraction or glassy-eyed piety from religious words, by telling stories about them, by grounding them in the world we live in as mortal and often comically fallible human beings.

Abstract words seem to be more difficult than concrete words.

Readers need to understand programs in detail and in concept. Sometimes they move from detail to concept, sometimes from concept to detail.

Versioned interfaces are a reasonable compromise when you absolutely must introduce new operations to an existing interface-based abstraction without affecting client code. They are not a long-term solution for frequently changing abstraction, because of the complexity they create both for client and framework developers.

First you learn the value of abstraction, then you learn the cost of abstraction, then you're ready to engineer

Ideas are not just counters used by the calculating mind; they are also golden vessels full of living feeling. "Freedom" is not a mere abstraction, it is also an emotion. ~Carl Jung, The Symbolic Life, Pages 310-311.

By confining our activity to a single sphere we have handed ourselves over to a master who is not infrequently to end up by suppressing the rest of our capacities. While in one place a luxuriant imagination ravages the hard-earned fruits of the intellect, in another the spirit of abstraction stifles the fire at which the heart might have warmed itself and the fancy been enkindled.

Because there are innumerable things beyond the range of human understanding, we constantly use symbolic terms to represent concepts that we cannot define or fully comprehend

I feel like your problem is that you're trying to judge all things in the abstract before you do them. That's your tragic mistake.

you cannot objectify the subjective; you cannot generalize the specific.

This attitude adds nothing to the explanation of the paradoxes, for it fails to recognize that the conception of motion at a point, which is the crux of the situation, is not a scientific notion but a mathematical abstraction.

The mathematical theory of continuity is based, not on intuition, but on the logically developed theories of number and sets of points.

Mathematics is the queen of the sciences.

The essence of mathematics is in its freedom.