Quotes About Abstract

Life is a process which may be abstracted from other media. —JOHN VON NEUMANN

As long as we think abstractly, as long as we find in patriotism and the exuberance of War our fulfillment, we will never understand those who do battle against us, or how we are perceived by them, or finally those who do battle for us and how we should respond to it all. We will never discover who we are. We will fail to confront the capacity we all have for violence.

As long as we think abstractly, as long as we find in patriotism and the exuberance of war our fulfillment, we will never understand those who do battle against us, or how we are perceived by them

He believed in mission. But . . . he did not believe in it as an intellectual imperative, or even as a professional standard. Mission . . . was an abstract notion that took meaning in concrete situations.

Parents are meant to be fixed objects, not abstract paintings.

Being a minority in both caste and class, we moved about anyway on the hem of life, struggling to consolidate our weaknesses and hang on, or to creep singly up into the major folds of the garment. Our peripheral existence, however, was something we had learned to deal with - probably because it was abstract.

What contemporary society needs is essentially abstract human relationships, so that even faceless people like me can earn their wages with no interference.

I believe that even our most abstract and philosophical views spring from an intensely personal base.

Abstract thought can anticipate by centuries hypotheses that find a use—or confirmation—in scientific inquiry.

For Plato, forms exist by themselves, in an ethereal ideal world of forms, a world of "ideas." The idea of a horse exists prior to and independently of any actual horse. For Plato, a real horse is nothing but a pale reflection of the idea of a horse. The atoms that make up the horse count for little: what counts is the "horseness," the abstract form.

In quantum mechanics no object has a definite position, except when colliding headlong with something else. In order to describe it in mid-flight, between one interaction and another, we use an abstract mathematical formula that has no existence in real space, only in abstract mathematical space.

The mind is inherently embodied. Thought is mostly unconscious. Abstract concepts are largely metaphorical.

In addition to going against the herd, you've said one of your techniques is to set yourself outside the process. What do you mean exactly? How do you get outside? I am outside. I am a thinking participant and thinking means putting yourself outside the subject you think about. Perhaps it comes easier to me than to many others because I have a very abstract mind and I actually enjoy looking at things, including myself, from the outside.

Nos vemos transportados literalmente por una nube de buena voluntad. Pero todo es un poco abstracto. ¿Puede la buena voluntad satisfacer por sí sola todas nuestras necesidades? ¿No es parte de nuestra naturaleza anhelar algo más tangible?

The narrative oftentimes is that everything that comes out of the hood is 'real,' and so I thought, 'I'll base it on the absurd, the not real. I'll twist the idea of real on its head and see if I can get away with it. I'll make paintings that come not from a place but through an abstract gaze.'

The most significant moment in the course of intellectual development, which gives birth to the purely human forms of practical and abstract intelligence, occurs when speech and practical activity, two previously completely independent lines of development, converge.

The type of contract between players and producers is, I feel, antiquated in form and abstract in concept. We have no privacies which producers cannot invade, they trade us like cattle, boss us like children.

I'm a fan of genre in the abstract, but at best, perhaps all we can really say when we talk about genre is that we're talking about an umbrella that covers a kind of story with certain elements.

So long as atrocities remain remote, abstract, they will be tolerated, even by decent people.

Wisdom is the abstract of the past, but beauty is the promise of the future.

You make knowledge relevant to life and you make it important for children to learn things that will really relate to things going on in their lives, and not abstract.

I've always had a more spatial mind, mathematical, than literal.

The spirit of an age may be best expressed in the abstract ideal arts, for the spirit itself is abstract and ideal.

In many museums, you see one of this and one of that. You gain an understanding of what Abstract Expressionism or Minimalism is, but you aren't given the chance to appreciate the mind of an artist.