Abstraction Quotes - Page 15

• When I was in law school I was taught that the great writers were people like [Oliver Wendell] Holmes Jr. and [Benjamin N.] Cardozo. But you go back and read their prose and it's sort of perfumed and very ornate and show-offy. And they're constantly striving for these abstractions that seem archaic nowadays.

  Jeffrey Rosen

  School, Law, People

  "What Would Brandeis Do?". "Amicus" with Dahlia Lithwick, www.slate.com. June 16, 2016.

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• There are ages in which the rational man and the intuitive man stand side by side, the one in fear of intuition, the other with scorn for abstraction. The latter is just as irrational as the former is inartistic.

  Friedrich Nietzsche

  Men, Intuition, Age

  Friedrich Nietzsche “Delphi Complete Works of Friedrich Nietzsche (Illustrated): Friedrich Nietzsche”, Delphi Classics

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• I am fully and entirely concentrated on the board. I never even consider my opponent's personality. So far as I am concerned, my opponent might as well be an abstraction or an automaton.

  Wilhelm Steinitz

  Personality, Opponents, Might

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• Hierarchy is a kind of order of abstractions.

  Grady Booch

  Order, Hierarchy, Kind

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• What the churches are peddling is high abstraction, and you really have to work yourself up into a lather to be able to accept that as worthy of that kind of attention. The psychedelic subset of society is into an experience, and it's accessible.

  Terence McKenna

  Church, Attention, Able

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• Greek is a musical and prolific language, that gives a soul to the objects of sense, and a body to the abstractions of philosophy.

  Edward Gibbon

  Philosophy, Giving, Greek

  Edward Gibbon (1840). “The history of the decline and fall of the Roman Empire”

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• In my experience, you either have encapsulation and abstraction or you have neither. There is no middle ground.

  Steve McConnell

  Middle, Middle Ground

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• Dialectical logic undoes the abstractions of formal logic and of transcendental philosophy, but it also denies the concreteness of immediate experience. To the extent to which this experience comes to rest with the things as they appear and happen to be, it is a limited and even false experience. It attains its truth if it has freed itself from the deceptive objectivity which conceals the factors behind the facts - that is, if it understands its world as a historical universe, in which the established facts are the work of the historical practice of man.

  Herbert Marcuse

  Philosophy, Men, Objectivity

  "One-Dimensional Man" by Herbert Marcuse, (p. 141), 1964.

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• The true God is not a form idealized; he/she/it is real and therefore, by definition, imperfect; only an abstraction can be free of flaws. And since God is imperfect, there will be suffering.... There is no perfect God. And your suffering requires no more explanation than that unavoidable imperfection.

  Robert J. Sawyer

  Real, Perfect, Suffering

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• The attempt to regulate relations between people too closely, by means of the law, in the name of an abstraction such as equality, leads to both absurdity and cruelty. The British are fast turning themselves into a nation of slaves, where even the slave-masters are not free.

  Anthony Daniels

  Mean, Law, Names

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• I submit that tennis is the most beautiful sport there is, and also the most demanding....Basketball comes close, but it's a team sport and lacks tennis's primal mano a mano intensity. Boxing might come close- at least at the lighter weight divisions- but the actual physical damage the fighters inflict on each other makes it too concretely brutal to be really beautiful- a level of abstraction and formality (i.e., play) is necessary for a sport to possess true metaphysical beauty (in my opinion).

  David Foster Wallace

  Basketball, Beautiful, Sports

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• 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.

  Aldous Huxley

  Art, Philosophy, Simple

  Aldous Huxley (1954). “The Collected Works of Aldous Huxley: Point counter point”

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• Oh, talk as we may of beauty as a thing to be chiselled from marble or wrought out on canvas, speculate as we may upon its colors and outlines, what is it but an intellectual abstraction, after all? The heart feels a beauty of another kind; looking through the outward environment, it discovers a deeper and more real love-liness.

  John Greenleaf Whittier

  Beauty, Real, Heart

  John Greenleaf Whittier (1866). “Literary recreations and miscellanies”, p.366

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• Behind the abstraction known as 'the markets' lurks a set of institutions designed to maximize the wealth and power of the most privileged group of people in the world, the creditor-rentier class of the First World and their junior partners in the Third.

  Doug Henwood

  Class, People, Groups

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• The endeavor of scientific research to see events in their more general connection in order to determine their laws, is a legitimate and useful occupation. Any protest against such efforts, in the name of freefom from restrictive conditions, would be fruitless if science did not naïvely identify the abstractions called rules and laws with the actually efficacious forces, and confuse the probability that B will follow A with the actual effort make B follow A.

  Max Horkheimer

  Order, Law, Names

  "Critical Theory: Selected Essays" by Max Horkheimer, (p. 150), 1982.

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• Everything abstract is ultimately part of the concrete. Everything inanimate finally serves the living. That is why every activity dealing in abstraction stands in ultimate service to a living whole.

  Edith Stein

  Unity, Abstract, Concrete

  Edith Stein (2012). “Edith Stein Essays on Woman”, p.11, ICS Publications

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• Amid the welter of vague political abstractions ... where meanings shift so quickly and so subtly, not only following changes of thought, but often manipulated artificially by political practitioners so as to obscure, expand, or distort ... a certain broad consistency in its relations to other kindred terms is the nearest approach to definition which such a term as Imperialism admits. Nationalism, internationalism, colonialism, its three closest congeners, are equally elusive, equally shifty, and the changeful overlapping of all four demands the closest vigilance.

  J. Allan Hobson

  Political, Consistency, Definitions

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• We have tried to fit man into abstraction, but he does not fit.

  Mark Tobey

  Men, Doe, Fit

  Bahai lecture, New York; as quoted in "Abstract Expressionist Painting in America", W.C. Seitz, 1983, p. 104, October 30, 1951.

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• My work has the abstraction underneath it all now & what I deliberately set out to do down here, for this is the perfect realistic abstraction in landscape.

  Marsden Hartley

  Perfect, Landscape, Realistic

  "Marsden Hartley" by Gail R. Scott, Abbeville Publishers, Cross River Press, New York (p. 68), 1988.

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• What I actually admire in Perl is its ability to provide a very successful abstraction of the horrible mess that is collectively called Unix.

  Erik Naggum

  Successful, Unix, Admire

  "Using Lisp to Call another program in linux?". Usenet discussion groups, groups.google.com. November 11, 2002.

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• We are concerned with similar states of consciousness and relationship to the world.. ..If previous abstractions paralleled the scientific and objective preoccupations of our times, ours are finding a pictoral equivalent for man's new knowledge and consciousness of his more complex inner self.

  Mark Rothko

  Men, Self, World

  Mark Rothko, Miguel López-Remiro (2006). “Writings on Art”, p.46, Yale University Press

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• It is easy now to communicate with people through abstraction, and particularly so in sculpture. Since the whole body reacts to its presence, people become themselves a living part of the whole.

  Barbara Hepworth

  People, Sculpture, Body

  Interview in The Studio, 1962.

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• I'd say that [Louis] Brandeis practiced a kind of a "living originalism," to use the title of Jack Balkin's great book. He said you start with the paradigm case, which in the case of the Fourth Amendment was these general warrants or writs of assistance, but you define it at a level of abstraction that you can take it into our age and make it our own.

  Jeffrey Rosen

  Book, Age, Titles

  Source: www.slate.com

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• Yes, there was an element of abstraction and unreality in misfortune. But when an abstraction starts to kill you, you have to get to work on it.

  Albert Camus

  Elements, Unreality, Misfortunes

  "The Plague". Book by Albert Camus, 1947.

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• Any person of any philosophic persuasion who sits on a hot stove will verify without any intellectual argument whatsoever that he is in an undeniably low-quality situation: that the value of his predicament is negative. This low quality is not just a vague, woolly-headed, crypto-religious, metaphysical abstraction. It is an experience. It is not a judgment about an experience. It is not a description of experience. The value itself is an experience. As such it is completely predictable. It is verifiable by anyone who cares to do so.

  Robert M. Pirsig

  Religious, Intellectual, Quality

  "Lila : An Inquiry Into Morals". Book by Robert M. Pirsig, 1991.

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