Abstract Quotes - Page 9

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

  George Lakoff

  Philosophy, Medicine, Mind

  George Lakoff, Mark Johnson (1999). “Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to Western Thought”, p.3, Basic Books

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• What intrigues me most about the human voice, is its ability to make all things transparent through its power of transformation. The voice is not just a conduit for words. For me it is like an abstract dream in which everything makes perfect sense.

  Azam Ali

  Dream, Voice, Perfect

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• This New Age is marking the dawn of a new world-thought. That new thought is a new cosmic concept of the value of man to man. The whole world is discovering that all mankind is one and that the unity of man is real – not just an abstract idea. Mankind is beginning to discover that the hurt of any man hurts every man, and, conversely, the uplift of any man uplifts every man

  Walter Russell

  Uplifting, Hurt, Real

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• The physical five oranges goes up the ladder to the picture of the five oranges which goes up to the representation of the five oranges as a numeral. This points in the direction of a definition of abstraction: when we abstract we voluntarily ignore details of a context, so that we can accomplish a goal.

  Dan Meyer

  Education, Math, Orange

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• One is almost tempted to say that the language itself is a mythology deprived of its vitality, a bloodless mythology so to speak, which has only preserved in a formal and abstract form what mythology contains in living and concrete form.

  Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling

  Vitality, Language, Speak

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• The appearance and disappearance of the Universe are pictured as an outbreathing and inbreathing of the" Great Breath," which is eternal, and which, being Motion, is one of the three aspects of the Absolute - Abstract Space and Duration being the other two.

  H. P. Blavatsky

  Two, Space, Three

  H. P. Blavatsky (2011). “The Secret Doctrine: The Synthesis of Science, Religion, and Philosophy”, p.43, Cambridge University Press

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• At least three time per day at scheduled times, he had to ask himself the following question: Am I being productive or just active? Charney captured the essence of this with less-abstract wording: Am I inventing things to do to avoid the important? He eliminated all of the activities he used as crutches and began to focus on demonstrating results instead of showing dedication. Dedication is often just meaningless work in disguise. Be ruthless and cut the fat.

  Tim Ferriss

  Inspirational, Cutting, Dedication

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• You don't approach a case with the philosophy of applying abstract justice-you go in to win

  Percy Foreman

  Philosophy, Winning, Justice

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• Well, I wanted to be a philosopher, which is the idlest occupation in the world. I wanted to be involved in abstract thought, but because of various problems with the authorities I wasn't able to pull that one off. A lifetime of idleness in academia would have really suited me. So I was thrown out, as it were. Other than that, there seemed no possible idle occupations, so writing . . . although writing isn't exactly idleness. There's an enormous tension between indolence and languor.

  Will Self

  Philosophy, Writing, Creativity

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• True knowledge of good and evil as we possess is merely abstract or general, and the judgment which we pass on the order of things and the connection of causes, with a view to determining what is good or bad for us in the present, is rather imaginary than real.

  Baruch Spinoza

  Gratitude, Real, Views

  Baruch Spinoza (2015). “Ethics”, p.361, Baruch Spinoza

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• Let woman's claim be as broad in the concrete as the abstract. We take our stand on the solidarity of humanity, the oneness of life, and the unnaturalness and injustice of all special favoritism, whether of sex, race, country, or condition. If one link of the chain is broken, the chain is broken.

  Anna Julia Cooper

  Country, Sex, Race

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• A true noun, an isolated thing, does not exit in nature. Things are only the terminal points, or rather the meeting points of actions, cross sections cut through actions, snapshots. Neither can a pure verb, an abstract motion, be possible in nature. The eye sees noun and verb as one, things in motion, motion in things.

  Ernest Fenollosa

  Eye, Cutting, Doe

  Ernest Fenollosa, Ezra Pound, Jonathan Stalling, Lucas Klein (2008). “The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry: A Critical Edition”, p.82, Fordham Univ Press

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• People like the idea of innovation in the abstract, but when you present them with any specific innovation, they tend to reject it because it doesn't fit with what they already know.

  Jessica Livingston

  Ideas, People, Innovation

  Jessica Livingston (2008). “Founders at Work: Stories of Startups' Early Days”, p.17, Apress

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• Information doesn’t deserve to be free. It is an abstract tool; a useful
  fantasy, a nothing. It is nonexistent until and unless a person experiences
  it in a useful way.

  Jaron Lanier

  Tools, Information, Way

  "A Q&A with Author Jaron Lanier". Amazon Interview, www.amazon.com. January 2010.

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• Algebraic geometry seems to have acquired the reputation of being esoteric, exclusive, and very abstract, with adherents who are secretly plotting to take over all the rest of mathematics. In one respect this last point is accurate.

  David Mumford

  Math, Lasts, Esoteric

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• Language [can] be expressed . . . by movements of the hands and face just as well as by the small, sound-generating movements of the throat and mouth. Then the first criterion for language that I had learned as a student—it is spoken and heard—was wrong; and, more important, language did not depend on our ability to speak and hear but must be a more abstract capacity of the brain. It was the brain that had language, and if that capacity was blocked in one channel, it would emerge through another.

  Harlan Lane

  Hands, Brain, Important

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• Abstract thinking leads to greater creativity... But in our businesses and our lives, we often do the opposite. We intensify our focus rather than widen our view.

  Daniel H. Pink

  Creativity, Thinking, Views

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• [Photography] puts a human face on issues which, from afar, can appear abstract or ideological or monumental in their global impact.

  James Nachtwey

  Photography, Motivation, Inspiration

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• We feel the beauty of nature because we are part of nature and because we know that however much in our separate domains we abstract from the unity of Nature, this unity remains. Although we may deal with particulars, we return finally to the whole pattern woven out of these.

  Ernest Everett Just

  Beauty, Nature, Knowing

  Ernest Everett Just (1939). “The Biology of the Cell Surface”, Taylor & Francis

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• I am convinced that abstract form, imagery, color, texture, and material convey meaning equal to or greater than words.

  Katherine McCoy

  Color, Texture, Form

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• The southern German has the imagination and emotionality to subscribe to a fanatic ideology, but he is ordinarily inhibited from excesses by his natural humaneness. The Prussian does not have the imagination to conceive in terms of abstract racial and political theories, but when he is told to do something, he does it.

  Arthur Seyss-Inquart

  Imagination, Southern, Political

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• A mathematician is an individual who calls himself a 'physicist' and does 'physics' and physical experiments with abstract concepts.

  Bill Gaede

  Doe, Physics, Individual

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• When a person you love dies, it doesn’t feel real. It’s like it’s happening to someone else. It’s someone else’s life. I’ve never been good with the abstract. What does it mean when someone is really truly gone?

  Jenny Han

  Real, Mean, Doe

  Jenny Han (2011). “It's Not Summer Without You”, p.2, Simon and Schuster

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• Joy Rains has a gift. A gift for explaining abstract concepts like meditation through clever analogies and metaphors. FOR THE FIRST TIME in my hectic, harried life I actually UNDERSTAND how meditation is supposed to work and WHY I should give it a TRY!

  Elisabeth Leamy

  Clever, Rain, Giving

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• Our relationship with places is a close bond, intricate in nature, and not abstract, not remote at all: It's enveloping, almost a continuum with all we are and think.

  Tony Hiss

  Thinking, Our Relationship, Continuum

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