Abstraction Quotes - Page 16

• An abstraction will move a mountain: Nothing can withstand an idea.

  Isabel Paterson

  Moving, Ideas, Mountain

  Isabel Paterson (1993). “The God of the Machine”, p.18, Transaction Publishers

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• The spontaneous tendency to invoke a Final Cause in explanation of every difficulty is characteristic of metaphysical philosophy. It arises from a general tendency towards the impersonation of abstractions which is visible throughout History.

  George Henry Lewes

  Philosophy, Finals, Causes

  George Henry Lewes (1864). “Aristotle: a chapter from the history of science including analyses of Aristotle's scientific writings”, p.86, London : Smith, Elder and Company

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• Such abstraction which refuses to accept the given universe of facts as the final context of validation, such "transcending" analysis of the facts in the light of their arrested and denied possibilities, pertains to the very structure of social theory.

  Herbert Marcuse

  Light, Validation, Finals

  Herbert Marcuse (2013). “One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society”, p.41, Routledge

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• In [Aristotle's] formal logic, thought is organized in a manner very different from that of the Platonic dialogue. In this formal logic, thought is indifferent toward its objects. Whether they are mental or physical, whether they pertain to society or to nature, they become subject to the same general laws of organization, calculation, and conclusion - but they do so as fungible signs or symbols, in abstraction from their particular "substance." This general quality (quantitative quality) is the precondition of law and order - in logic as well as in society - the price of universal control.

  Herbert Marcuse

  Order, Law, Organization

  "One-Dimensional Man" by Herbert Marcuse, (p. 136), 1964.

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• Isolated material particles are abstractions, their properties being definable and observable only through their interaction with other systems .

  Niels Bohr

  Interaction With Others, Isolated, Materials

  Niels Bohr, Leon Rosenfeld (1985). “Collected works”

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• Philosophy does not exist. It is nothing but an hypostatized abstraction.

  R. D. Laing

  Philosophy, Doe

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• The most refined abstractions of logic conduct to a view of life, which, though startling to the apprehension, is, in fact, that which the habitual sense of its repeated combinations has extinguished in us. It strips, as it were, the painted curtain from this scene of things. I confess that I am one of those who are unable to refuse my assent to the conclusions of those philosophers who assert that nothing exists but as it is perceived.

  Percy Bysshe Shelley

  Life, Views, Facts

  Percy Bysshe Shelley (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley (Illustrated)”, p.1820, Delphi Classics

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• Documentary photography is becoming more illustrative as people become more familiar with photography’s limitations and vulnerabilities. Reality has always been interpreted through layers of manipulation, abstraction, and intervention. But now, it is very much on the surface. I like this honesty about its dishonesty. Every photograph has many truths and none. Photographs are ambiguous, no matter how seemingly scientific they appear to be. They are always subject to an uncontrollable context. This is a tired statement, but worth repeating.

  Taryn Simon

  Photography, Honesty, Tired

  Interview with Geoffrey Batchen, Nell McClister, www.museomagazine.com.

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• The effort of painting from life has cost my models a great deal of physical discomfort, and cost me a great deal of money in model fees... I have wanted to make the camera obsolete... because, in my reading about early 20th century art, I found that the most frequently used argument made in favor of abstraction was that the camera made realist painting obsolete.

  Philip Pearlstein

  Photography, Art, Reading

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• Part of knowing who we are is knowing we are not someone else. And Jew is only the name we give to that stranger, the agony we cannot feel, the death we look at like a cold abstraction. Each man has his Jew; it is the other.

  Arthur Miller

  Men, Knowing, Agony

  1964 Leduc. Incident at Vichy, act1.

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• Beauty surrounds us, but usually we need to be walking in a garden to know it. RUMI, attributed, Conquest of Abundance: A Tale of Abstraction Versus the Richness of Being Don't grieve. Anything you lose comes round in another form.

  Rumi

  Garden, Grieving, Needs

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• When scientists need to explain difficult points of theory, illustration by hypothetical example - rather than by total abstraction - works well (perhaps indispensably) as a rhetorical device. Such cases do not function as speculations in the pejorative sense - as silly stories that provide insight into complex mechanisms - but rather as idealized illustrations to exemplify a difficult point of theory. (Other fields, like philosophy and the law, use such conjectural cases as a standard device.

  Stephen Jay Gould

  Philosophy, Silly, Law

  Stephen Jay Gould (2011). “Leonardo's Mountain of Clams and the Diet of Worms”, p.310, Harvard University Press

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• Being is transcended by a concern for being. Our perplexity will not be solved by relating human existence to a timeless, subpersonal abstraction which we call essence. We can do justice to human being only by relating it to the transcendent care for being.

  Abraham Joshua Heschel

  Essence, Justice, Care

  Abraham Joshua Heschel (1965). “Who is Man?”, p.91, Stanford University Press

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• If more people had put their fellow human beings before abstractions last century, we shouldn't be where we are now.

  Brian Aldiss

  People, Lasts, Century

  "Greybeard". Book by Brian Aldiss, 1964.

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• We do not need French post-structuralism, whose pedantic jargon, clumsy convolutions, and prissy abstractions have spread throughout academe and the arts and are now blighting the most promising minds of the next generation. This is a major crisis if there ever was one, and every sensible person must help bring it to an end.

  Camille Paglia

  Art, Mind, Needs

  Camille Paglia (2011). “Sex, Art, and American Culture: Essays”, p.8, Vintage

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• The word 'abstract' comes from the light tower of the philosophers. One of their spotlights that they have particularly focused on 'Art'. [Abstraction was] not so much what you could paint but rather what you could not paint. You could not paint a house or a tree or a mountain. It was then that subject matter came into existence as something you ought not have.

  Willem de Kooning

  Art, Light, House

  "Abstract Expressionist Painting in America". Book by William C. Seitz, p. 104, 1983.

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• It is interesting to observe how real the object remains, in spite of all abstractions.

  Paul Klee

  Real, Interesting, Spite

  Paul Klee, Jürg Spiller (1992). “Paul Klee Notebooks: The thinking eye”, Overlook Pr

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• Most American cities shop to their best advantage when seen from a height or from a distance, at a point where the ugliness of the buildings dissolves into the beauty of an abstraction.

  Lewis H. Lapham

  Distance, Cities, America

  "Money And Class In America: Notes And Observations On Our Civil Religion" by Lewis H. Lapham, (Chapter 3, The Golden Horde, p. 58), 1989.

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• Mystic equality lies in abstraction, not in having or in doing, which are processes. In function and process, one man, one part, must of necessity be subordinate to another. It is a condition of being.

  D. H. Lawrence

  Lying, Men, Process

  D. H. Lawrence (2016). “Women in Love”, p.219, Xist Publishing

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• When we hear complaints of the wretchedness or vanity of human life, the proper answer to them would be that there is hardly any one who at some point or other has not been in love. If we consider the high abstraction of this feeling, its depth, its purity, its voluptuous refinement, even in the meanest breast, how sacred and how sweet it is, this alone may reconcile us to the lot of humanity. That drop of balm turns the bitter cup to a delicious nectar.

  William Hazlitt

  Love, Sweet, Vanity

  William Hazlitt (1871). “The Round Table. A collection of Essays ... By W. H. and Leigh Hunt”, p.507

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• WHATEVER Life may really be, it is to us an abstraction: for the word is a generalised term to signify that which is common to all animals and plants, and which is not directly operative in the inorganic world.

  Bill Vaughan

  Animal, World, May

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• The desert is no longer a landscape, it is a pure form produced by the abstraction of all others.

  Jean Baudrillard

  Desert, Landscape, Form

  Jean Baudrillard (1989). “America”, p.127, Verso

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• Abstraction and realism work best together.

  Ken Danby

  Together, Realism

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• But the nature of our civilized minds is so detached from the senses, even in the vulgar, by abstractions corresponding to all theabstract terms our languages abound in, and so refined by the art of writing, and as it were spiritualized by the use of numbers, because even the vulgar know how to count and reckon, that it is naturally beyond our power to form the vast image of this mistress called "Sympathetic Nature.

  Giambattista Vico

  Art, Writing, Numbers

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• Do you know what punishments I've endured for my crimes, my sins? None. I am proof of the absurdity of men's most treasured abstractions. A just universe wouldn't tolerate my existence.

  Brent Weeks

  Men, Nihilism, Sin

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