Abstraction Quotes - Page 17

• At long last he was unencumbered, emancipated from the stifling world of his parents and peers, a world of abstraction and security and material excess, a world in which he felt grievously cut off from the raw throb of existence.

  Jon Krakauer

  Cutting, Long, Parent

  Jon Krakauer (2011). “Into the Wild”, p.22, Pan Macmillan

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• Soon the child’s clear eye is clouded over by ideas and opinions, preconceptions, and abstractions. Simple free being becomes encrusted with the burdensome armor of the ego. Not until years later does an instinct come that a vital sense of mystery has been withdrawn. The sun glints through the pines and the heart is pierced in a moment of beauty and strange pain, like a memory of paradise. After that day, we become seekers.

  Peter Matthiessen

  Life, Beauty, Spiritual

  Peter Matthiessen (1998). “Nine-Headed Dragon River: Zen Journals 1969-1982”, p.8, Shambhala Publications

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• A whole population of strangers inhabited and shaped that little body, lived in that mind and controlled its wishes, dictated its thoughts...The name was an abstraction, a title arbitrarily given, like "France" or "England," to a collection, never long the same, of many individuals who were born, lived, and died within him, as the inhabitants of a country appear and disappear, but keep alive in their passage the identity of the nation to which they belong.

  Aldous Huxley

  Country, Names, Long

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• I care about strangers when they're abstractions, but I feel almost nothing when they're literally in front of me.

  Chuck Klosterman

  Care, Stranger, Feels

  Chuck Klosterman (2014). “I Wear the Black Hat: Grappling with Villains (Real and Imagined)”, p.2, Simon and Schuster

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• Suddenly absurdism wasn’t an intellectual abstraction, it was actually realism. You could see the way that wealth was begetting wealth, wealth was begetting comfort — and that the cumulative effect of an absence of wealth was the erosion of grace.

  George Saunders

  Erosion, Grace, Intellectual

  George Saunders (2013). “Tenth of December”, p.27, A&C Black

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• Nobody is driven by abstractions like 'seeking truth.

  Michael Crichton

  Driven, Seeking Truth, Seeking

  Michael Crichton (1997). “Michael Crichton's Jurassic World”, Alfred a Knopf Incorporated

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• People who are too fastidious towards the finite never reach actuality, but linger in abstraction, and their light dies away.

  Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

  Light, People, Finite

  Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1904). “The Logic of Hegel”

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• Abstraction can provide stumbling blocks for people of strange intelligence.

  Gustave Flaubert

  Block, People, Strange

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• Talk—half-talk, phrases that had no need to be finished, abstractions, Chinese bells played on with cotton-tipped sticks, mock orange blossoms painted on porcelain. The muffled, close, half-talk of soft-fleshed women. The men she had embraced, and the women, all washing against the resonance of my memory. Sound within sound, scene within scene, woman within woman—like acid revealing an invisible script. One woman within another eternally, in a far-reaching procession, shattering my mind into fragments, into quarter tones which no orchestral baton can ever make whole again.

  Anais Nin

  Memories, Men, Orange

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• The acts of the mind, wherein it exerts its power over simple ideas, are chiefly these three: 1. Combining several simple ideas into one compound one, and thus all complex ideas are made. 2. The second is bringing two ideas, whether simple or complex, together, and setting them by one another so as to take a view of them at once, without uniting them into one, by which it gets all its ideas of relations. 3. The third is separating them from all other ideas that accompany them in their real existence: this is called abstraction, and thus all its general ideas are made.

  John Locke

  Real, Simple, Views

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• In recent years my understanding of God had evolved into increasingly remote abstractions. I'd come to think of God in terms like Divine Reality, the Absolute, or the One who holds us in being. I do believe that God is beyond any form and image, but it has grown clear to me that I need an image in order to relate. I need an image in order to carry on an intimate conversation with what is so vast, amorphous, mysterious, and holy that it becomes ungraspable. I mean, really, how to you become intimate with Divine Reality? Or the Absolute?

  Sue Monk Kidd

  Believe, Mean, Reality

  Sue Monk Kidd, Ann Kidd Taylor (2009). “Traveling with Pomegranates: A Mother and Daughter Journey to the Sacred Places of Greece, Turkey, and France”, p.38, Penguin

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• It's no wonder we don't defend the land where we live. We don't live here. We live in television programs and movies and books and with celebrities and in heaven and by rules and laws and abstractions created by people far away and we live anywhere and everywhere except in our particular bodies on this particular land at this particular moment in these particular circumstances.

  Derrick Jensen

  Book, Law, Land

  Derrick Jensen (2011). “Endgame, Volume 2: Resistance”, p.242, Seven Stories Press

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• We must not see any person as an abstraction. Instead, we must see in every person a universe with its own secrets, with its own treasures, with its own sources of anguish, and with some measure of triumph.

  Elie Wiesel

  Secret, Triumph, Treasure

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• Yet how strange a thing is the beauty of music! The brief beauty that the player brings into being transforms a given period of time into pure continuance; it is certain never to be repeated; like the existence of dayflies and other such short-lived creatures, beauty is a perfect abstraction and creation of life itself. Nothing is so similar to life as music.

  Yukio Mishima

  Player, Perfect, Strange

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• Man cannot survive except through his mind. He comes on earth unarmed. His brain is his only weapon. Animals obtain food by force. man had no claws, no fangs, no horns, no great strength of muscle. He must plant his food or hunt it. To plant, he needs a process of thought. To hunt, he needs weapons,and to make weapons - a process of thought. From this simplest necessity to the highest religious abstraction, from the wheel to the skyscraper, everything we are and we have comes from a single attribute of man -the function of his reasoning mind.

  Ayn Rand

  Religious, Animal, Men

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• When Philosophy with its abstractions paints grey in grey, the freshness and life of youth has gone, the reconciliation is not a reconciliation in the actual, but in the ideal world.

  Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

  Philosophy, Philosophical, Gone

  Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Jesse Glenn Gray (1997). “On Art, Religion, and the History of Philosophy: Introductory Lectures”, p.258, Hackett Publishing

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• When novels deal in abstractions, they generally go off the rails.

  Philipp Meyer

  Novel, Deals, Rail

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• All non-trivial abstractions, to some degree, are leaky.

  Joel Spolsky

  Degrees

  Joel Spolsky (2004). “Joel on Software”, p.199, Apress

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• As a movement Cubism had consistently stopped short of complete abstraction. Heretics such as Delaunay had painted pure abstractions but in so doing had deserted Cubism.

  Alfred H. Barr, Jr.

  Movement, Cubism, Heretic

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• Someone who is incapable of drawing, and cannot master line or colour perspective can always express themselves in some form of abstraction.

  Hans Werner Henze

  Drawing, Perspective, Lines

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• The job of the color photographer is to provide some level of abstraction that can take the image out of the daily.

  Joel Sternfeld

  Jobs, Color, Levels

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• There is an amount of abstraction in my movies, and sometimes they don't really understand it until the film is finished.

  Michel Gondry

  Sometimes, Film, Finished

  "Michel Gondry on Mood Indigo, special effects, Jim Carrey, and Charlie Kaufman". Interview with A.A. Dowd, www.avclub.com. July 23, 2014.

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• Mankind? That is an abstraction. There have always been and always will be only individuals.

  Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

  Individual, Mankind

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• There is absolutely no such thing as reading but by a candle. We have tried the affectation of a book at noon-day in gardens, and in sultry arbours, but it was labor thrown away. Those gay motes in the beam come about you, hovering and teasing, like so many coquets, that will have you all to their self, and are jealous of your abstractions. By the midnight taper, the writers digests his meditations. By the same light we must approach to their perusal, if we would catch the flame, the odour.

  Charles Lamb

  Book, Reading, Jealous

  Charles Lamb (1894). “The Essays of Elia and The Last Essays of Elia”, New York : Frederick A. Stokes Company

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• We did not adopt socialism out of books, abstractions, humanism, or pity, but rather out of need for the Arab working class is the mover of history in this period.

  Michel Aflaq

  Book, Class, Needs

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