Abstraction Quotes - Page 12

• 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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• I still believe in abstraction, but now I know that one ends with abstraction, not starts with it

  Alexander Stepanov

  Believe, Ends, Stills

  "Evolving a language in and for the real world: C++ 1991-2006". June 2007.

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• Every good composition is above all a work of abstraction. All good painters know this. But the painter cannot dispense with subjects altogether without his work suffering impoverishment.

  Diego Rivera

  Suffering, Very Good, Painter

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• Not one idiot in a thousand has been entirely refractory to treatment, not one in a hundred has not been made more happy and healthy; more than thirty per cent have been taught to conform to social and moral law, and rendered capable of order, of good feeling, and of working like the third of a man; more than forty per cent have become capable of the ordinary transactions of life under friendly control, of understanding moral and social abstractions, of working like two-thirds of a man.

  Edouard Seguin

  Men, Two, Order

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• If you have a large number of unrelated ideas, you have to get quite a distance away from them to get a view of all of them, and this is the role of abstraction. If you look at each too closely you see too many details. If you get far away things may appear simpler because you can only see the large, broad outlines; you do not get lost in petty details.

  John G. Kemeny

  Distance, Learning, Views

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• In the development of the understanding of complex phenomena, the most powerful tool available to the human intellect is abstraction. Abstraction arises from the recognition of similarities between certain objects, situations, or processes in the real world and the decision to concentrate on these similarities and to ignore, for the time being, their differences.

  Tony Hoare

  Powerful, Real, Learning

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• Computer Science is a science of abstraction -creating the right model for a problem and devising the appropriate mechanizable techniques to solve it.

  Alfred Aho

  Learning, Creating, Technique

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• We have also obtained a glimpse of another crucial idea about languages and program design. This is the approach of statified design, the notion that a complex system should be structured as a sequence of levels that are described using a sequence of languages. Each level is constructed by combining parts that are regarded as primitive at that level, and the parts constructed at each level are used as primitives at the next level. The language used at each level of a stratified design has primitives, means of combination, and means of abstraction appropriate to that level of detail.

  Hal Abelson

  Learning, Mean, Ideas

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• Suppose that you want to teach the 'cat' concept to a very young child. Do you explain that a cat is a relatively small, primarily carnivorous mammal with retractible claws, a distinctive sonic output, etc.? I'll bet not. You probably show the kid a lot of different cats, saying 'kitty' each time, until it gets the idea. To put it more generally, generalizations are best made by abstraction from experience.

  Ralph P. Boas, Jr.

  Children, Cat, Kids

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• If you want an application to be portable, you don't necessarily create an abstraction layer like a microkernel so much as you program intelligently.

  Linus Torvalds

  Want, Layers, Program

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• If sorrow and beauty are all tied up together, then perhaps maturity brings with it not what Nabhan calls abstraction, but an aesthetic sense that partially redeems the losses time brings and finds beauty in the faraway.

  Rebecca Solnit

  Loss, Maturity, Sorrow

  Rebecca Solnit (2006). “A Field Guide to Getting Lost”, p.24, Penguin

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• You can deny, if you like, nearly all abstractions: justice, beauty, truth, goodness, mind, God. You can deny seriousness, but not play.

  Johan Huizinga

  Play, Justice, Mind

  Johan Huizinga (1971). “Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-Element in Culture”, p.9, Beacon Press

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• Abstract understanding doesn't mean arbitrary sloshing and messing. Abstract art is controlled visual magic based on laws and methodology. Abstraction generally involves implication, suggestion and mystery rather that obvious description. Like a good poem, a good abstraction attacks your feelings before your understanding. Abstraction within realism adds zest and excitement to otherwise dull subject matter. Abstract understanding takes time and patience.

  Robert Genn

  Art, Mean, Zest

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• The American house has been TV-centered for three generations. It is the focus of family life, and the life of the house correspondingly turns inward, away from whatever corresponds beyond its four walls.At the same time, the television is the families chief connection to the world. The physical envelope of the house itself no longer connects their lives to the outside in any active way; rather it seals them from it.The outside world has become an abstraction filtered through television, just as the weather is an abstraction filtered through air conditioning.

  James Howard Kunstler

  Wall, Weather, Air

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• All art is abstract, because art is an abstraction of the truth.

  Milford Zornes

  Art, Abstract, Art Is

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• Pay attention to minute particulars. Take care of the little ones. Generalization and abstraction are the plea of the hypocrite, scoundrel, and knave.

  William Blake

  Hypocrite, Hypocrisy, Attention

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• Before abstraction everything is one, but one like chaos; after abstraction everything is united again, but this union is a free binding of autonomous, self-determined beings. Out of a mob a society has developed, chaos has been transformed into a manifold world.

  Novalis

  Self, World, Unions

  "Blüthenstaub". Book by Novalis, 1798.

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• Abstraction is the enemy of meaning.

  Marshall Ganz

  Enemy

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• To be an abstraction does not mean that an entity is nothing. It merely means that its existence is only a factor of a more concrete element of nature.

  Alfred North Whitehead

  Nature, Mean, Doe

  Alfred North Whitehead (2015). “The Concept of Nature: Tarner Lectures”, p.109, Cambridge University Press

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• To us investigators, the concept 'soul' is irrelevant and a matter for laughter. But matter is an abstraction of exactly the same kind, just as good and just as bad as it is. We know as much about the soul as we do of matter.

  Ernst Mach

  Laughter, Science, Soul

  Ernst Mach (2014). “History and Root of the Principle of the Conservation of Energy”, p.48, Cambridge University Press

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• The Geometer has the special privilege to carry out, by abstraction, all constructions by means of the intellect.

  Evangelista Torricelli

  Mean, Science, Special

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• Do not copy nature. Art is an abstraction. Rather, bring your art forth by dreaming in front of her and think more of creation.

  Paul Gauguin

  Dream, Art, Thinking

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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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• I am glad that the country world...retains a power to use our English tongue. It is a part of its sense of reality, of its vocabulary of definite terms, and of its habit of earthly common sense. I find this country writing an excellent corrective of the urban vocabulary of abstractions and of the emotion disguised as thinking which abstractions and humbug have loosed upon the world. May there always be such things as a door, a milk pail, and a loaf of bread, and words to do them honor.

  Henry Beston

  Country, Writing, Reality

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• I work in colour sometimes, but I guess the images I most connect to, historically speaking, are in black and white. I see more in black and white - I like the abstraction of it.

  Mary Ellen Mark

  Black And White, Sometimes, Colour

  "Photographer Mary Ellen Mark's best shot". Interview with Andrew Pulver, www.theguardian.com. November 25, 2009.

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