Quotes About Abstraction

You can't explain collateralized debt obligation in a novel - it's too draggy.

El mexicano no quiere ser ni indio, ni español. Tampoco quiere descender de ellos. Los niega. Y no se afirma en tanto que mestizo, sino como abstracción: es un hombre. Se vuelve hijo de la nada. Él empieza en sí mismo.

What runs so contrary to received wisdom is that it really is the male who is the aesthete while the woman is drawn to abstractions.

It has no reference to anything other than itself. You can name the notes with the letters of the alphabet if you like but it doesnt change anything. Oddly, they are not abstractions. Is music as we know it complete? In what sense? Are there classes such as major and minor we've yet to discover?

At that time the only treatment of angelism, that is, excessive abstraction of the self from itself, was recovery of the self through ordeal.

He registered a dizzy 7.6 mmv over Brodmann 32, the area of abstractive activity. Since that time I have learned that a reading over 6 generally means that a person has so abstracted himself from himself and from the world around him, seeing things as theories and himself as a shadow, that he cannot, so to speak, reenter the lovely ordinary world. Such a person, and there are millions, is destined to haunt the human condition like the Flying Dutchman.

Einstein's great strength: he could look at a complex mathematical equation, which for others was merely an abstraction, and picture the physical reality that lay behind it.

Thus, 1 is actually a function with the two bound variables f and x. Just offhand, those two variables seem like two more variables than are needed to define a simple number.

In the battle between Kronecker and Cantor, Cantor would ultimately prevail. Cantor's theory would show that Kronecker's precious integers-and even the rational numbers-were nothing at all. They were an infinite zero.

The notion developed that the breach of reason with nature was a necessary one; that man had to make it in order to develop his powers of reason and abstraction. Schiller makes this point in his Letters on the Aestethic education of Man, as does Hölderin in his Hyperion Fragment. The belief was that the human destiny was to return to nature at a higher level, having made a synthesis of reason and desire.

Descriptive statistics exist to simplify, which always implies some loss of nuance or detail.

In just the same way the thousands of successive positions of a runner are contracted into one sole symbolic attitude, which our eye perceives, which art reproduces, and which becomes for everyone the image of a man who runs.

grape, knife, cup, wheat / are symbols in eternity, / and every concrete object / has abstract value, is timeless / in the dream parallel

It is the universal nature of human Bildung to constitute itself as a universal intellectual being. Whoever abandons himself to his particularity is ungebildet ("unformed")—e.g., if someone gives way to blind anger without measure or sense of proportion. Hegel shows that basically such a man is lacking in the power of abstraction. He cannot turn his gaze from himself towards something universal, from which his own particular being is determined in measure and proportion.

The proliferation of nominalizations in a discursive formation may be an indication of a tendency toward pomposity and abstraction.

Making the pictures ridiculous is what enables you to really see them; a logical picture is usually too vague.

Some of the simplest things in like are the most difficult to imagine.

Some of the simplest things in life are the most difficult to imagine.

H]e (Socrates) thus implies that there is a parallelism between the city and the human individual or, more precisely, between the city and the soul of the human individual. This means that the parallelism between the city and the human individual is based upon a certain abstraction from the human body.

In his own way each man must struggle, lest the moral law become a far-off abstraction utterly separated from his active life.

The more primitive a language is the less it abstracts. [...] As the language with its people advances in civilization it classifies, i.e. abstracts and simplifies more and more; it sees common qualities and drops out those distinctions that do not subserve life. A similar process may be observed in the formation of what we call Parts of Speech.

If you reside too much in the mind, then you get too abstract and cut off from the world. You long for the spiritual life, but you can't get to it, and you fall into despair. The exercise of the senses frees you from abstraction and opens the way to transcendence.

Art, unlike the trades in the artistic capacity of fashion and food, can literally be anything. It can be the negation of itself and conceptually not present.

I hardly need to abstract things, for each object is unreal enough already, so unreal that I can only make it real by means of painting.