Abstraction Quotes - Page 18

• The world expects of Christians that they will raise their voices so loudly and clearly and so formulate their protest that not even the simplest man can have the slightest doubt about what they are saying. Further, the world expects of Christians that they will eschew all fuzzy abstractions and plant themselves squarely in front of the bloody face of history. We stand in need of folk who have determined to speak directly and unmistakably and come what may, to stand by what they have said.

  Albert Camus

  Christian, Religious, Men

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• The possible truths, hazily perceived in the world of abstraction, like those inferred from observation and experiment in the world of matter, are forced upon the profane multitudes, too busy to think for themselves, under the form of Divine revelation and scientific authority. But the same question stands open from the days of Socrates and Pilate down to our own age of wholesale negation: is there such a thing as absolute truth in the hands of any one party or man?

  H. P. Blavatsky

  Spiritual, Party, Men

  Lucifer Magazine, February 1888.

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• Denotation by means of sounds and markings is a remarkable abstraction. Three letters designate God for me; several lines a million things. How easy becomes the manipulation of the universe here, how evident the concentration of the intellectual world! Language is the dynamics of the spiritual realm. One word of command moves armies; the word liberty entire nations.

  Novalis

  God, Spiritual, Moving

  "Pollen and Fragments". Book by Novalis. Fragment No. 2, 1798.

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• Essential truth, the truth of the intellectualists, the truth with no one thinking it, is like the coat that fits tho no one has ever tried it on, like the music that no ear has listened to. It is less real, not more real, than the verified article; and to attribute a superior degree of glory to it seems little more than a piece of perverse abstraction-worship.

  William James

  Truth, Real, Thinking

  William James (2015). “The Meaning of Truth: Human Understanding”, p.78, 谷月社

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• When needs and means become abstract in quality, abstraction is also a character of the reciprocal relation of individuals to oneanother. This abstract character, universality, is the character of being recognized and is the moment which makes concrete, i.e. social, the isolated and abstract needs and their ways and means of satisfaction.

  Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

  Character, Mean, Quality

  Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1945). “Hegel's Philosophy of right”

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• It would be a mistake to believe that one could come to any substantive understanding of politics by discussing abstractly the good, the right, the true, or the rational in complete abstraction from the way in which these items figure in the motivationally active parts of the human psyche, and particularly in abstraction from the way in which they impinge, even if indirectly, on human action.

  Raymond Geuss

  Mistake, Believe, Understanding

  Raymond Geuss (2008). “Philosophy and Real Politics”, p.28, Princeton University Press

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• My father painted, well into his 80s, what he called hard edge abstractions. It's really cool.

  Lewis Black

  Father, Really Cool, Wells

  "Interview: Lewis Black, new special, "In God We Rust," premieres midnight tonight on Comedy Central". www.scpr.org. September 7, 2012.

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• Every nervous system creates its own "reality," minute by minute - we live inside a "bubble" of neural abstractions which we identify with reality. You can make this neurological fact into conscious experience, and you will never be bored or depressed again.

  Robert Anton Wilson

  Reality, Bored, Facts

  Source: theanarchistlibrary.org

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• Abstraction allows man to see with his mind what he cannot see physically with his eyes.

  Arshile Gorky

  Eye, Men, Mind

  Arshile Gorky (2005). “Նամակներ”

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• Music, first of all, is completely about abstraction, which is exactly what architecture is not. In a way, it has been incredibly constructive to know what true abstraction is. So you dont fall into the trap of thinking that what you do is abstract.

  Rafael Vinoly

  Fall, Thinking, Way

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• The career of a young theoretical physicist consists of treating the harmonic oscillator in ever-increasing levels of abstraction.

  Sidney Coleman

  Careers, Levels, Young

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• Science is a little bit more than a wonderful way of modelling and predicting; its a wonderful technical abstraction. I think science is a really wonderful technical abstraction.

  Bernard Beckett

  Thinking, Littles, Way

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• The most intelligent hearers are those who enjoy most heartily the simplest preaching. It is not they who clamor for superlatively intellectual or aesthetic sermons. Daniel Webster used to complain of some of the preaching to which he listened. "In the house of God" he wanted to meditate "upon the simple varieties, and the undoubted facts of religion;" not upon mysteries and abstractions.

  Austin Phelps

  Intelligent, Simple, House

  Austin Phelps (1882). “Men and Books: Or Studies in Homiletics; Lectures Introductory to The Theory of Preaching”

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• That's what it is that you rehearse - the making of music, not the playing of notes as abstractions.

  Sarah Caldwell

  Notes

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• Money, after all, is an abstract artifact, like language - merely symbolized by the paper or coin or whatever. If you can fully grasp its abstractedness, especially in the computer age, it becomes quite clear that no group can monopolize this abstraction, except through a series of swindle. If the usurers had been bolder, they might have monopolized language as well as currency, and people would be saying we can't write more books because we don't have enough words, the way they now say we can't build starships, because we don't have enough money.

  Robert Anton Wilson

  Book, Writing, People

  Source: theanarchistlibrary.org

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• ...there is an idea of a Patrick Bateman, some kind of abstraction, but there is no real me, only an entity, something illusory, and though I can hide my cold gaze and you can shake my hand and feel flesh gripping yours and maybe you can even sense our lifestyles are probably comparable: I simply am not there.

  Bret Easton Ellis

  Real, Hands, Ideas

  FaceBook post by Bret Easton Ellis from Jan 20, 2015

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• The main reason why men and women make different aesthetic judgments is the fact that the latter, generally incapable of abstraction, only admire what meets their complete approval.

  Franz Grillparzer

  Men, Appreciate, Different

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• Willem de Kooning is generally credited for coming out of the painterly gates strong in the forties, revolutionizing art and abstraction and reaching incredible heights by the early fifties, and then tailing off.

  Jerry Saltz

  Art, Strong, Height

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• Early-twentieth-century abstraction is art's version of Einstein's Theory of Relativity. It's the idea that changed everything everywhere: quickly, decisively, for good.

  Jerry Saltz

  Art, Ideas, Theory

  "Saltz: MoMA’s Inventing Abstraction Is Illuminating—Although It Shines That Light Mighty Selectively". www.vulture.com. January 6, 2013.

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• Abstraction is everybody's zero but nobody's nought.

  Robert Smithson

  Zero, Artist

  Robert Smithson, Jack D. Flam (1996). “Robert Smithson, the Collected Writings”, p.42, Univ of California Press

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• Washington isn't a city, it's an abstraction.

  Dylan Thomas

  Cities

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• This is our dilemma--either to taste and not to know or to know and not to taste--or, more strictly, to lack one kind of knowledge because we are in an experience or to lack another kind because we are outside it. [. . .] Of this tragic dilemma myth is the partial solution. In the enjoyment of a great myth we come nearest to experiencing as a concrete what can otherwise be understood only as an abstraction.

  C. S. Lewis

  Taste, Kind, Tragic

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• It took me twenty years to get Steven Parrino's work. From the time I first saw his art, in the mid-eighties, I almost always dismissed it as mannered, Romantic, formulaic, conceptualist-formalist heavy-metal boy-art abstraction.

  Jerry Saltz

  Art, Boys, Years

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• There is nothing mysterious, as some have tried to maintain, about the applicability of mathematics. What we get by abstraction from something can be returned.

  Raymond Louis Wilder

  Math, Mysterious, Mathematics

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• When we are mired in the relative world, never lifting our gaze to the mystery, our life is stunted, incomplete; we are filled with yearning for that paradise that is lost when, as young children, we replace it with words and ideas and abstractions - such as merit, such as past, present, and future - our direct, spontaneous experience of the thing itself, in the beauty and precision of this present moment.

  Peter Matthiessen

  Children, Past, Ideas

  Peter Matthiessen (1998). “Nine-Headed Dragon River: Zen Journals 1969-1982”, p.16, Shambhala Publications

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