Abstract Quotes - Page 37

• Nothing is more abstract than reality.

  Giorgio Morandi

  Reality

  Karen Wilkin, Giorgio Morandi (2007). “Giorgio Morandi: works, writings and interviews”, Poligrafa Ediciones Sa

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• For my own part, I abandon the ethics of duty to the Hegelian critique with no regrets; it would appear to me, indeed, to have been correctly characterized by Hegel as an abstract thought, as a thought of understanding.

  Paul Ricoeur

  Regret, Understanding, Ethics

  Paul Ricoeur (2005). “The EPZ Conflict of Interpretations”, p.408, A&C Black

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• Mathematics, even in its present and most abstract state, is not detached from life. It is just the ideal handling of the problems of life.

  Cassius Jackson Keyser

  Education, Science, World

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• Ordinary language is totally unsuited for expressing what physics really asserts, since the words of everyday life are not sufficiently abstract. Only mathematics and mathematical logic can say as little as the physicist means to say.

  Bertrand Russell

  Life, Mean, Math

  Bertrand Russell (1992). “The Basic Writings of Bertrand Russell, 1903-1959”, p.626, Psychology Press

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• Like a stool which needs three legs to be stable, mathematics education needs three components: good problems, with many of them being multi-step ones, a lot of technical skill, and then a broader view which contains the abstract nature of mathematics and proofs. One does not get all of these at once, but a good mathematics program has them as goals and makes incremental steps toward them at all levels.

  Richard Askey

  Education, Math, Skills

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• Two contrasting attitudes: non-math person: "Math is so abstract." i.e. "hard to understand" math person: We abstract *in order to understand.* Part of our job is to teach people this latter mentality.

  James Key

  Education, Jobs, Attitude

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• And so on, until you arrive at the other side, among the purely abstract self-harming: the grinding over your failures, the refusal to remember anything good, the determination to ensure - if anyone falls into the mistake of making it clear they actually like you - that the next time round they change their opinion pronto. Emotional self-cannibalism, in other words, like those tessellated pictures of a person grappling with a mirror image of himself.

  Alexander Masters

  Determination, Mistake, Fall

  Alexander Masters (2006). “Stuart: A Life Backwards”, Random House Digital, Inc.

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• Love is never abstract. It does not adhere to the universe or the planet or the nation or the institution or the profession, but to the singular sparrows of the street, the lilies of the field, "to the least of these my brethren." Love is not, by its own desire, heroic. It is heroic only when compelled to be. It exists by its willingness to be anonymous, humble, and unrewarded.

  Wendell Berry

  Love, Humble, Desire

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• Love is not a word that describes my feelings; it is not a technique by which I fulfill my needs; it is not an ideal, abstract and pure, on which I meditate or discourse. It is acting in correspondence with or in response to God in relation to persons.

  Eugene H. Peterson

  Love, Feelings, Acting

  Eugene H. Peterson (2006). “God's Message for Each Day: Wisdom from the Word of God”, Thomas Nelson Inc

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• I never wavered in my certainty that God did not exist. I was simply liberated by the thought that there might be a way to engage with religion without having to subscribe to its supernatural content - a way, to put it in more abstract terms, to think about Fathers without upsetting my respectful memory of my own father. I recognized that my continuing resistance to theories of an afterlife or of heavenly residents was no justification for giving up on the music, buildings, prayers, rituals, feasts, shrines, pilgrimages, communal meals and illustrated manuscripts of the faiths.

  Alain de Botton

  Atheist, Giving Up, Memories

  "Katie Antoniou interviews Alain de Botton on his new book 'Religion for Atheists'". Interview with Katie Antoniou, www.run-riot.com. January 24, 2012.

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• "The people" is that massive portion of a society that lives by its pathetic subjection to sheer immediacy or self-obviousness, and that therefore uncritically seizes upon the most simplistic and abstract ways of filling its vacuous self-consciousness. Not philosophy but dogma and rhetoric, not rationality but indoctrination and conditioning, provide the cultural junkfood by which the Many perfunctorily slake their thirst and hunger.

  Kenny Smith

  Philosophy, Self, People

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• The scripture notion of truth is not an abstract, static, and timeless formula, but is something that comes true in time as the fulfillment of a divine promise. Truth happens in history.

  Peter Kreeft

  Truth, Promise, Scripture

  Peter Kreeft (1992). “Back to Virtue: Traditional Moral Wisdom for Modern Moral Confusion”, p.75, Ignatius Press

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• One might suppose that reality must be held to at all costs. However, though that may be the moral thing to do, it is not necessarily the most useful thing to do. The Greeks themselves chose the ideal over the real in their geometry and demonstrated very well that far more could be achieved by consideration of abstract line and form than by a study of the real lines and forms of the world; the greater understanding achieved through abstraction could be applied most usefully to the very reality that was ignored in the process of gaining knowledge.

  Isaac Asimov

  Real, Math, Understanding

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• The concept of 'talent' is formed under completely abstract criteria, having nothing in common with reality. But the reality is such that I don't understand chess as a whole. But then again no one understands chess in its entirety. Perhaps talent is something else, in chess it is conditionality.

  Alexander Morozevich

  Reality, Practice, Chess

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• I came in with a healthy skepticism about these programs. My team evaluated them. We scrubbed them thoroughly. We actually expanded some of the oversight, increased some of the safeguards. But my assessment, and my team's assessment was that they help us prevent terrorist attacks. In the abstract, you can complain about 'Big Brother' and how this is a potential program run amok. But when you actually look at the details, then, I think we've struck the right balance.

  Barack Obama

  Running, Brother, Team

  Obama's Remarks on Health Care and Surveillance, www.nytimes.com. June 7, 2013.

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• Experience has proved that there is no difference between a so-called realist painting - of a landscape, for example - and an abstract painting. They both have more or less the same effect on the observer.

  Gerhard Richter

  Differences, Abstract Painting, Example

  FaceBook post by Gerhard Richter from Oct 28, 2015

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• Ivan Ilych saw that he was dying, and he was in continual despair. In the depth of his heart he knew he was dying, but not only was he not accustomed to the thought, he simply did not and could not grasp it. The syllogism he had learnt from Kiesewetter's Logic: "Caius is a man, men are mortal, therefore Caius is mortal," had always seemed to him correct as applied to Caius, but certainly not as applied to himself. That Caius - man in the abstract - was mortal, was perfectly correct, but he was not Caius, not an abstract man, but a creature quite, quite separate from all others.

  Leo Tolstoy

  Heart, Men, Dying

  Leo Tolstoy (2010). “The Death of Ivan Ilych: English-Russian Parallel Text Edition”, p.70, Lulu.com

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• ...the materialism of modern civilization is paradoxically founded on a hatred of materiality, a goal-oriented desire to obliterate all natural limits through technology, imposing an abstract grid over nature.

  Alan Watts

  Technology, Civilization, Goal

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• 'Environment' is not an abstract concern, or simply a matter of aesthetics, or of personal taste - although it can and should involve these as well. Man is shaped to a great extent by his surroundings. Our physical nature, our mental health, our culture and institutions, our opportunities for challenge and fulfillment, our very survival - all of these are directly related to and affected by the environment in which we live. They depend upon the continued healthy functioning of the natural systems of the Earth.

  Richard M. Nixon

  Men, Opportunity, Challenges

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• An abstract painting need in 50 years by no means look "abstract" any longer.

  Marcel Duchamp

  Art, Mean, Years

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• With God thoughts are colors, with us they are pigments-even the most abstract one may be accompanied by physical pain.

  Georg C. Lichtenberg

  Pain, Color, May

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• Write a paper promising salvation, make it a "structured" something or a "virtual" something, or "abstract," "distributed" or "higher-order" or "applicative" and you can almost be certain of having started a new cult.

  Edsger Dijkstra

  Writing, Order, Paper

  "My hopes of computing science" by Edsger Dijkstra, www.cs.utexas.edu. April 1979.

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• Good writing, and this is especially important in a subject such as economics, must also involve the reader in the matter at hand. It is not enough to explain. The images that are in the mind of the writer must be made to reappear in the mind of the reader, and it is the absence of this ability that causes much economic writing to be condemned, quite properly, as abstract.

  John Kenneth Galbraith

  Writing, Hands, Mind

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• For centuries, we in the West have thought of ourselves as rational animals whose mental capacities transcend our bodily nature. In this traditional view our minds are abstract, logical, unemotionally rational, consciously accessible, and, above all, able to directly fit and represent the world. Language has a special place in thie view of what a human is - it is a privileged, logical symbol system internal to our minds that transparently expresses abstract concepts that are defined in terms of the external world itself.

  George Lakoff

  Animal, Views, Mind

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• I feel it's just some sort of game if it's just abstract.

  Jeffrey Smart

  Art, Games, Feels

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