Quotes About Abstract

Bourgeois society is ruled by equivalence. It makes the dissimilar comparable by reducing it to abstract quantities. To the enlightenment, that which does not reduce to numbers, and ultimately to the one, becomes illusion.

You can see likewise that the contradiction involved in the concept of 'salvaging' is not a simple intellectual contradiction, but a dialectical one. That is to say, it is only possible to rescue ontology in the shape of this dialectical contradiction, in this pattern in which existence and existent things are mutually interrelated and interdependent - as opposed to an abstract conception of ontology as pure existence standing in absolute opposition to existing beings.

Rightly understood, it is an all-embracing, intrusive question, and for this reason many prefer to dodge it or to proceed as if it were an abstract, theoretical question.

Justice? What is justice? It's a mere word. It's an abstract word with no universal meaning. To different classes of people, justice means different things.

Man is subordinate to certain absolute values; there is no delight in the human form leading to its natural reproduction; it is always distorted to fit the more abstract forms which convey intense religious emotion.

Esas obligaciones y tareas, y en consecuencia el sentido de la vida, difieren en cada hombre, en un momento u otro, de manera que resulta imposible concebir el sentido de la vida en términos abstractos.

The inner life has its soft and gentle beauty; an abstract formlessness as well as a subtle charm. I often consider myself as a figure in a foggy painting: faltering lines, insecure distances, and a merging of greys and blacks. An emotion or a mood—a mere wisp of color—is shaded off and made to spread until it becomes one with all that surrounds it.

To have memory return is to find consciousness pervaded by a variety of identifications, all simultaneously composing and fragmenting a shared public space, until that space itself seems to authorise another, far more abstract and imposing 'I'.

If you can love abstractly, you're only a bad day away from hating abstractly.

Why should color, of all things, be at the center of so much crossfire? Perhaps because in meddling with such a deep and seemingly instinctive area of perception, culture camouflages itself as nature more successfully there than in any other area of language. There is nothing remotely abstract, theoretical, philosophical, hypothetical, or any other -cal, so it seems, about the difference between yellow and red or between green and blue.

As earl as the seventeenth century, John Locke recognized that in the realm of abstract notions each language is allowed to carve up its own concepts -- or "specific ideas" as he called them -- in its own way.

In other words there is something otherworldly about our existence here --something more than matter, more than the body and mind we have been discussing -- in short, something fundamentally and profoundly abstract. And I mention this aspect because it is not at all obvious, indeed scarcely notices by the great majority of us as we go about our daily lives.

legal procedure has always tacitly been concerned with human relations, rather than abstract justice, and that consequently in spite of the legal codes it is really the human relations underneath that determine the verdicts in the courts.

A corollary of this philosophy was that the writer did not believe in good or evil. Nor did he believe in justice. Like crime, justice was an abstract, something cooked up by men. It wasn't intrinsic to the universe. Life just was. It happened, sometimes meagerly, sometimes abundantly, sometimes in violent excess. There was no right or wrong about any of it.

All individual thought is dissolved in universal thought, as all form is dissolved in the universal plastic means of Abstract-Real painting.

To most middle-class feminists, as to most middle-class non-feminists, working-class women remain mysterious creatures to be "reached out to" in some abstract way. No connection. No solidarity.

I was painter staring at a canvas waiting for the forgotten visions of my new abstract piece to come to me. But I am the abstract piece and my mind cannot comprehend the work my heart has created.

Cryptic messages and abstract statements are littered throughout the music of Happy Birthday, but it hasn't made the band's sun-baked pop-rock any less infectious.

These essays are about life: about its end, its meaning, its value, and about the metaphysics of consciousness. Some of the topics have not received much attention from analytic philosophers, because it is hard to be clear and precise about them, and hard to separate from a mixture of facts and feelings those questions abstract enough for philosophical treatment.

Let us note that art - even on an abstract level - has never been confined to 'idea'; art has always been the 'realized' expression of equilibrium.

I think that magic, at its root, is a very abstract notion. There's no real, approved definition. And, in that sense, it's like love; you can only see magic by the effect it has on people.

My art has no object, no image, no point of focus.

It is very wrong to kill any one[.] Oh, I hate the cheap severity of abstract ethics!

Mathematics is not physics. The physical sciences can be weighed against each other. And against what we suppose to be the world. Mathematics cant be weighed against anything.