Quotes About Abstractions

Now, if you combine functional fixity with chunking, and stir in the curse that hides each one from our awareness, you get an explanation of why specialists use so much idiosyncratic terminology, together with abstractions, metaconcepts, and zombie nouns. They are not trying to bamboozle us; that's just the way they think.

The Seasons Difference is a suave and urbane comedy about several immense abstractions - faith, innocence, loneliness, and love.

The ideologue begins by selecting a few abstractions in whose low-resolution representations hide large, undifferentiated chunks of the world. Some examples include "the economy," "the nation," "the environment," "the patriarchy," "the people," "the rich," "the poor," "the oppressed," and "the oppressors.

First, it is a commitment to particularism, to giving priority to the specificity of particulars, not to abstractions and generalities that divert our attention away from concrete realities. Idealizations tend to be partial and distorting, obscuring the heterogeneity and complexity of actual experiences and concrete practices, which is why they do not provide an adequate standpoint for the diagnosis of social problems and injustices.

God's providence is never characterized in broad generalities or pious abstractions but always in the particular, in the personal, in the recognition of grace in an unlikely time, at an unlikely place. Who could have anticipated ravens?

I cannot worship the abstractions of virtue: she only charms me when she addresses herself to my heart, speaks through the love from which she springs.

Go in fear of abstractions.

Fritz Perls actually made three technical distinctions for poisonous assignment of value: chickenshit, bullshit, and elephant shit. Chickenshit is a normal greeting that doesn't mean what it says, as in "Hello, how are you?" "I'm fine, how are you?" Bullshit is normal conversation in which people are simply whiling away the time with meaningless abstractions and generalizations. Elephant shit is any discussion of Gestalt theory or of Radical Honesty.

The pursuit of truth is just a polite name for the intellectual's favorite pastime of substituting simple and therefore false abstractions for the living complexities of reality.

Do you know what punishments I've endured for my crimes, my sins? None. I am proof of the absurdity of men's most treasured abstractions. A just universe wouldn't tolerate my existence.

Coming from a business family, she shied away from abstractions.

If chimpanzees have consciousness, if they are capable of abstractions, do they not have what until now has been described as human rights? How smart does a chimpanzee have to be before killing him constitutes murder? What further properties must he show before religious missionaries must consider him worthy of attempts at conversion?

All three of Kepler's laws of planetary motion can be derived from Newtonian principles. Kepler's laws were empirical, based upon the painstaking observations of Tycho Brahe. Newton's laws were theoretical, rather simple mathematical abstractions from which all of Tycho's measurements could ultimately be derived. From these laws, Newton wrote with undisguised pride in the Principia, "I now demonstrate the frame of the System of the World.

We no longer have death in our culture: the dead become abstractions, statistics, companies will take charge of the relationship that we can have to our own dead. In 2, 3 days the cremation is done, we can forget, the question is settled and the dead is only a memory. This is problematic, because we risk falling first into what Freud calls melancholy, that is to say the impossibility of mourning because we no longer have an object to mourn.

I say the word Anti-Semite is vulgar and pedantic : that I think will be universally admitted. It is also nonsensical. The antagonism to the Jews has nothing to do with any supposed Semitic race which probably does not exist any more than do many other modern hypothetical abstractions, and which, anyhow, does not come into the matter. The Anti-Semite is not a man who hates the modern Arabs or the ancient Carthaginians. He is a man who hates Jews.

abstractions may be indispensable. But they don't accurately reflect reality.

Hinduism advises such people not to try to think of God as the supreme instance of abstractions like being or consciousness, and instead to think of God as the archetype of the noblest reality they encounter in the natural world.

The dance of capital, the harmony of a balance sheet, and the way these abstractions interact with people, their characters and desires, either as individuals or in a mass. Understand that one is the other, that they are two separate ways of expressing the same thing, and you understand the whole nature of business.

Even at its most perceptive, sociology deals in abstractions.

Graye was handsome, frank, and gentle. He had a quality of thought which, exercised on homeliness, was humour; on nature, picturesqueness; on abstractions, poetry. Being, as a rule, broadcast, it was all three. Of the wickedness of the world he was too forgetful. To discover evil in a new friend is to most people only an additional experience: to him it was ever a surprise.

If one chooses to call tests that require the mastery of abstractions culturally biased, because some cultures put more emphasis on abstractions than others, that raises fundamental questions about what the tests are for. In a world where the ability to master abstractions is fundamental to mathematics, science and other endeavors, the measurement of that ability is not an arbitrary bias. A culture-free test might be appropriate in a culture-free society—but there are no such societies.

I believe that history has shape, order, and meaning that exceptional men, as much as economic forces, produce change and that passe abstractions like beauty, nobility, and greatness have a shifting but continuing validity.

anybody who would dismiss them as mere tinkering would have to be a very committed adversary indeed! And he would have to demonstrate, not merely through intellectual abstractions but by pointing to an actual system in practice somewhere which can show better results and no scandals of one form or another.

Numbers were originally abstractions, invented just to quantify things, to count rocks or people or grapes or whatever. The fact that dust floating in the air & the price of stock options behave according to the same mathematical principles, the fact that everything in the universe apparently can be described or predicted with a mathematical equation-a radical idea when Pythagoras suggested it- is probably the most startling coincidence in the history of mankind.