Quotes About Abstraction

We must say that there are as many squares as there are numbers.

Movies are too literal.

I don't ever get too literal.

It is interesting to think of the great blaze of heaven that we winnow down to animal shapes and kitchen tools.

you get Kandinsky, a bad mother, all them pick-up-sticks pictures...

Gone were the landscape paintings of the past, the pictures of ancient Greek heroes, the portraits of women in their silks and feathers. Painters began to reduce everything to simple squares and circles, the intersection of triangles. They were thrilled by geometry. They talked about achieving weightlessness, of painting pictures that were no longer mired in the world. They wanted to leave the earth behind.

The real determinant of society is hidden behind the state and the economy: it is the way in which our everyday activity is organised, the subordination of our doing to the dictates of abstract labour, that is, of value, money, profit. It is this abstraction which is, after all, the very existence of the state. If we want to change society, we must stop the subordination of our activity to abstract labour, do something else.

Precisely because [historians'] detachment from and elevation above the landscape of the past, historians are able to manipulate time and space in ways they never could manage as normal people. They can compress these dimensions, expand them, compare them, measure them, and even transcend them, almost as poets, playwrights, novelists, and film-makers do. Historians have always been, in this sense, abstractionists: the literal representation of reality is not their task.

Music, uniquely among the arts, is both completely abstract and profoundly emotional.

The abstract has no emotional content... the abstract is more powerful the more abstract it is.

Abstraction means getting away from a visual interpretation but nearer to an emotional one.

Become aware of internal, subjective, sub-verbal experiences, so that these experiences can be brought into the world of abstraction.

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.

The high intellectual value of images, however, lies in the fact that they usually, and perhaps always, fit more than one actual experience.

Whether a photo or music, or a drawing or anything else I might do—it's ultimately all an abstraction of my peculiar experience.

Abstraction is an exercise in a pre-assured failure. It is a futile attempt to communicate the non-communicable

Joan Mitchell—abstract painter

No hay que confundir el sentido del número con la facultad de contar. Únicamente la inteligencia humana puede alcanzar un grado de abstracción capaz de permitir el acto de contar, aunque el sentido del número está presente en muchos animales.

Alles Sehen und Erkennen der Dinge und Gesetze ohne Gott wird zur Abstraktion, zur Loslösung vom Ursprung und vom Ziel.

Three or four drops of height have nothing to do with savageness.

Since a three-dimensional object casts a two-dimensional shadow, we should be able to imagine the unknown four-dimensional object whose shadow we are.

Since a three-dimensional object casts a two-dimensional shadow, we should be able to imagine the unknown four-dimensional object whose shadow we are. I for my part am fascinated by the search for a one-dimensional object that casts no shadow at all.

Mathematics consists of processes independent of the number. You must remove the number from your thinking and instead dwell on the idea and process of the underlying logic. The faster you do this, the quicker math will begin to make sense to you. Then maybe your life, but defiantly your grade, will get better.

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