Quotes About Abstraction

Apeirogon: a shape with a countably infinite number of sides.

the only sign that Katharine gave of abstraction was to forget to help the pudding. She looked so like her mother, as she sat there oblivious of the tapioca

Because of a streak of dreaminess and a gentle abstraction in his nature, Victor in any queue was always at its very end. He had long since grown used to this handicap, as one grows used to weak sight or a limp.

Oh, 'philosophy.' You know. When you try to imagine a mirok [small pink potato] without the least reference to any you have eaten or will eat.

Most American cities shop to their best advantage when seen from a height or from a distance, at a point where the ugliness of the buildings dissolves into the beauty of an abstraction.

This is the postmodern desert inhabited by people who are, in effect, consuming themselves in the form of images and abstractions through which their desires, sense of identity, and memories are replicated and then sold back to them as products

The relation demanded by religion between man and God must be of a personal character. No man can love a pure abstraction; he might as reasonably fall in love with a triangle or profess devotion to the equator. The God of religion must be a person, and it is precisely that, as a controlling force of the universe, in which modern thought finds it more and more difficult to believe, and which modern science decisively rejects.

Perhaps it is the increasing abstraction of ourselves from the world, to which language contributes, that explains why "fifteen years ago people could distinguish 300,000 sounds; today many children can't go beyond 100,000 and the average is 180,000. Twenty years ago the average subject could detect 350 shades of a particular color. Today the number is 130."13 By naming the world, abstracting it and reducing it, we impoverish our perception of it. Language

The Aleph moment would be followed, on a timescale of seconds, by the degeneration of physics into pure mathematics. Just as the Big Bang implied pre-space before it – an infinitely symmetric roiling abstraction where nothing really existed or happened – the Aleph moment would bring on the informational mirror image, another infinite wasteland without time or space.

Still more astonishing is that world of rigorous fantasy we call mathematics.

The mind cannot just manufacture words for abstract concepts out of thin air – all it can do is adapt what is already available.

abstract' comes from a Latin verb which simply meant 'draw away' (abstrahere).

What's an ideologue?" "Someone who brings religious passion to a political abstraction only cretins could think up," he said. "When you meet one, flee his presence at all costs. He'll incinerate half the planet to save the other half and never understand his own motivations.

If any philosopher had been asked for a definition of infinity, he might have produced some unintelligible rigmarole, but he would certainly not have been able to give a definition that had any meaning at all.

If particulars are to have meaning, there must be universals.

Awareness of universals is called conceiving, and a universal of which we are aware is called a concept.

The main reason why men and women make different aesthetic judgments is the fact that the latter, generally incapable of abstraction, only admire what meets their complete approval.

If power is abstraction, which many black men, black women, and people of color have very little voice in, well, then I want to sit at the table.

The natural does not have to be a specific representation. I am now working on a thing which is a reconstruction of a starry sky, yet I make it, nevertheless, without a given in nature.

When you're trying to solve a problem on a new product type, you become completely focused on problems that seem a number of steps removed from the main product. That problem solving can appear a little abstract, and it is easy to lose sight of the product.

he'd paid for should have led me to greater abstraction, but while it's true that the farther you get from an actual product the better your chances for economic success, I and many of my classmates wanted more physical evidence of our efforts.

I've written a lot of books which are written from the moon - the view from nowhere.

I don't deal with the nuts and bolts of life.

By object is meant some element in the complex whole that is defined in abstraction from the whole of which it is a distinction.