Abstraction Quotes - Page 11

• The beauty of physics lies in the extent which seemingly complex and unrelated phenomena can be explained and correlated through a high level of abstraction by a set of laws which are amazing in their simplicity.

  Melvin Schwartz

  Lying, Science, Law

  Melvin Schwartz (2012). “Principles of Electrodynamics”, p.105, Courier Corporation

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• All forms of beauty, like all possible phenomena, contain an element of the eternal and an element of the transitory - of the absolute and of the particular. Absolute and eternal beauty does not exist, or rather it is only an abstraction creamed from the general surface of different beauties. The particular element in each manifestation comes from the emotions: and just as we have our own particular emotions, so we have our own beauty.

  Charles Baudelaire

  Beauty, Justice, Doe

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• God must be allowed the right to speak unpredictably.... We must find him in our enemy, or we may lose him even in our friend. We must find him in the pagan or we will lose him in our own selves, substituting for his living presence an empty abstraction.

  Thomas Merton

  Faith, Inspiration, Self

  Thomas Merton, Ernesto Cardenal (2017). “From the Monastery to the World: The Letters of Thomas Merton and Ernesto Cardenal”, p.312, Counterpoint Press

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• The Hindus have cultivated the power of analysis and abstraction. No nation has yet produced a grammar like that of Panini.

  Swami Vivekananda

  Analysis, Hinduism, Grammar

  Swami Vivekananda (2015). “The Complete Works of Swami Vivekananda”, p.2599, Manonmani Publishers

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• There are no steps to self-realization. There is nothing gradual about it. It happens suddenly and is irreversible. You rotate into a new dimension, seen from which the previous ones are mere abstractions. Just like on sunrise you see things as they are, so on self-realization you see everything as it is. The world of illusions is left behind.

  Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

  Self, Sunrise, Dimensions

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• We do not wish to imitate nature, we do not wish to reproduce. We want to produce. We want to produce the way a plant produces its fruit, not depict. We want to produce directly, not indirectly. Since there is not a trace of abstraction in this art we call it concrete art.

  Hans Arp

  Art, Wish, Want

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• Of the many forms of false culture, a premature converse with abstractions is perhaps the most likely to prove fatal to the growth of a masculine vigour of intellect.

  George Boole

  Science, Growth, Culture

  George Boole (1872). “A Treatise on Differential Equations”, p.6

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• Do not copy nature too much. Art is an abstraction.

  Paul Gauguin

  Art, Too Much, Copies

  Paul Gauguin, Robert John Goldwater (1972). “Paul Gauguin”, Harry N Abrams Inc

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• The individual is the true reality of life. A cosmos in himself, he does not exist for the State, nor for that abstraction called "society," or the "nation," which is only a collection of individuals.

  Emma Goldman

  Reality, Liberty, Doe

  Emma Goldman (1998). “Red Emma Speaks: An Emma Goldman Reader”

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• Since opposed principles, or ideologies, are irreconcilable, wars fought over principle will be wars of mutual annihilation. But wars fought for simple greed will be far less destructive, because the aggressor will be careful not to destroy what he is fighting to capture. Reasonable - that is, human - men will always be capable of compromise, but men who have dehumanized themselves by becoming the blind worshipers of an idea or an ideal are fanatics whose devotion to abstractions makes them the enemies of life.

  Alan Watts

  War, Fighting, Simple

  "The Way of Zen".

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• Lying mouth to mouth, kiss to kiss in the pillow dark, loin to loin in unbelievable surrendering sweetness so distant from all our mental fearful abstractions it makes you wonder why men have termed God antisexual somehow (p. 148)

  Jack Kerouac

  Lying, Dark, Kissing

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• Mathematics is much more than a language for dealing with the physical world. It is a source of models and abstractions which will enable us to obtain amazing new insights into the way in which nature operates. Indeed, the beauty and elegance of the physical laws themselves are only apparent when expressed in the appropriate mathematical framework.

  Melvin Schwartz

  Nature, Science, Law

  Melvin Schwartz (2012). “Principles of Electrodynamics”, p.1, Courier Corporation

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• History is not the story of strangers, aliens from another realm; it is the story of us had we been born a little earlier. History is memory; we have to remember what it is like to be a Roman, or a Jacobite or a Chartist or even - if we dare, and we should dare - a Nazi. History is not abstraction, it is the enemy of abstraction.

  Stephen Fry

  Memories, History, Enemy

  "The future's in the past". www.theguardian.com. July 9, 2006.

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• Agape's object is always the concrete individual, not some abstraction called humanity. Love of humanity is easy because humanity does not surprise you with inconvenient demands. You never find humanity on your doorstep, stinking and begging.

  Peter Kreeft

  Life, Humanity, Doe

  "Love". Fundamentals of the Faith: Essays in Christian Apologetics, www.peterkreeft.com. 1988.

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• Only in Relationship can you know yourself, not in abstraction and certainly not in isolation. The movement of behavior is the sure guide to yourself. It's the mirror of your consciousness; this mirror will reveal its content, the images, the attachments, the fears, the loneliness, the joy and sorrow. Poverty lies in running away from this, either in its sublimations or its identities.

  Jiddu Krishnamurti

  Love, Life, Relationship

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• If I see a human body on the stage, I don't see it as an abstraction. I see it as a body.

  Antony Tudor

  Dance, Ballet, Body

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• Holidays are in no sense an alternative to the congestion and bustle of the cities and work. Quite the contrary. People look to escape into an intensification of the conditions of ordinary life, into a deliberate aggravation of those conditions: further from nature, nearer to artifice, to abstraction, to total pollution, to well above average levels of stress, pressure, concentration and monotony - this is the ideal of popular entertainment. No one is interested in overcoming alienation; the point is to plunge into it to the point of ecstasy. That is what holidays are for.

  Jean Baudrillard

  Stress, Holiday, Vacation

  "Cool Memories".

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• Love is not some complex, mystical abstraction. It is something accessible and human that we learn through our everyday experience, as often at times of failure as in moments of ecstasy.

  Leo Buscaglia

  Love You, Love Is, Everyday

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• The body, the mind, and the spirit don't form a pyramid, they form a circle. Each of them runs into the other two. The body isn't below the mind and the spirit; from the point of view it's between them. if you reside too much in the mind, then you get too abstract and cut off from the world. You long for the spiritual life, but you can't get to it, and you fall into despair. The exercise of the senses frees you from abstraction and opens the way to transcendence.

  Jane Smiley

  Running, Spiritual, Fall

  Jane Smiley (2017). “Moo”, p.216, Pan Macmillan

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• A revolution was never fought, throughout history, for ideals. Revolutions were fought for much more concrete things: food, clothes, housing, and to relieve intolerable oppression. … I know of no one, outside of Patrick Henry, willing to die for an abstraction.

  William Powell

  Clothes, Revolution, Oppression

  "The Anarchist Cookbook". Book by William Powell, Chapter Two: "Electronics, Sabotage, and Surveillance", 1971.

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• Accordingly, France Had Voltaire, and his school of negative thinkers, and England (or rather Scotland) had the profoundest negative thinker on record, David Hume: a man, the peculiarities of whose mind qualified him to detect failure of proof, and want of logical consistency, at a depth which French skeptics, with their comparatively feeble powers of analysis and abstractions stop far short of, and which German subtlety alone could thoroughly appreciate, or hope to rival.

  John Stuart Mill

  Religious, School, Men

  John Stuart Mill (2008). “Utilitarianism and On Liberty: Including 'Essay on Bentham' and Selections from the Writings of Jeremy Bentham and John Austin”, p.55, John Wiley & Sons

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• The spiritual life is not a special career, involving abstraction from the world of things. It is a part of every man's life; and until he has realized it, he is not a complete human being, has not entered into possession of all his powers.

  Evelyn Underhill

  Spiritual, Men, Careers

  Evelyn Underhill (1914). “Practical Mysticism: A Little Book for Normal People”

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• The abstraction, ostensibly, is simply for me the penetration of something that is more profound in many ways than rigidity of a form. A form if it breathes some, if it has some enigma to it, it is also the enigma that is the abstract, I would think.

  Beauford Delaney

  Thinking, Profound, Way

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• Only in relationship can you know yourself, not in abstraction, and certainly not in isolation.

  Jiddu Krishnamurti

  Relationship, Isolation, Know Yourself

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• Human nature being what it is, peace must inevitably be a relative condition. The essence of life is struggle and competition, and to that extent perfect peace is an almost meaningless abstraction. Struggle and competition are stimulating, but when they degenerate into conflict it is usually both destructive and disruptive. The aim of political institutions like the United Nations is to draw the line between struggle and conflict and to make it possible for nations to stay on the right side of that line.

  Javier Perez de Cuellar

  Struggle, Essence, Perfect

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