Quotessence
Home / Topics / Abstraction Quotes

Abstraction Quotes

Browse 521 quotes about Abstraction.

Related topics

AbstractArtIfsWorldThinkingMenRealWayPeopleConcreteRealityFormMeanHumansIdeasKnowsDoePaintingFactsKindMindObjectsFeelsLevelsFirstsSelfGivingMathematicsPhilosophyAbstract ArtCertainExistenceLooksMayPersonsReasonShouldWritingArt IsConceptsDrawingEndsIndividualLawMaterialsParticularScienceStoriesArtistMomentsOrderPureTryingUniverseUseAgeBelieveBodyEasyElementsEyeHas BeensLightMathematicalMatterNamesNeedsPaintPastPrinciplesSeemsShapesTwoWantWellsAbsolutesIntellectualLanguageMadeSimpleYearsAreasCenturyColorDoneEmotionEntityEventsFallIdealsLinesLongMightPlayReal WorldRealismRealizingSpiritStatesStillsmore

Abstraction Quotes

“Here lies the total abstraction and the source of all domination: in the breakdown of the dual relation. The strategy of domination is, indeed, to ensure that, through all the techniques of communication, through inescapable, streaming information, there can no longer be any response. It is a domination by signs empty of meaning. But, on the other side, there is an equal indifference and blank resistance.”

IndifferenceAbstractionMeaninglessnessVirtualityPost Modern Domination
Book:The Intelligence of Evil or the Lucidity Pact
Create image

“If you want to influence a country’s intellectual trend, the first step is to bring order to your own ideas and integrate them into a consistent case. Knowledge necessarily includes the ability to apply abstract principles in specific issues, to demonstrate them, and to advocate a consistent course of action. What is required is honesty - intellectual honesty, which consists in knowing what one does know, constantly expanding one’s knowledge, and never evading or failing to correct a contradiction”

IdeasOrderKnowledgeInfluenceHonestyIntellectualAbstractionIntellectual HonestyAbstract Thinking
Author:Ayn Rand
Create image

“I imagined a labyrinth of labyrinths, a maze of mazes, a twisting, turning, ever-widening labyrinth that contained both past and future and somehow implied the stars. Absorbed in those illusory imaginings, I forgot that I was a pursued man; I felt myself, for an indefinite while, the abstract perceiver of the world. The vague, living countryside, the moon, the remains of the day did their work in me; so did the gently downward road, which forestalled all possibility of weariness. The evening was near, yet infinite.”

ImaginationContemplationAbstractionLabyrinth
Book:Ficciones
Create image

“On almost every front, we have begun a turning away from a felt relationship with the natural world. The blinding of the stars is only one aspect of this retreat from the real. In so many ways, there has been a prising away of life from place, an abstraction of experience into different kinds of touchlessness. We experience, as no historical period has before, disembodiment and dematerialisation. The almost infinite connectivity of the technological world, for all the benefits that it has brought, has exacted a toll in the coin of contact. We have in many ways forgotten what the world feels like. And so new maladies of the soul have emerged, unhappinesses which are complicated products of the distance we have set between ourselves and the world.”

NatureTechnologyLonelinessDistanceIsolationWildernessAbstractionModernityConnectednessThe Wild
Book:The Wild Places
Create image

“In asking philosophical questions, we use a reason shaped by the body, a cognitive unconscious to which we have no direct access, and metaphorical thought of which we are largely unaware. The fact that abstract thought is mostly metaphorical means that answers to philosophical questions have always been, and always will be, mostly metaphorical. In itself, that is neither good nor bad. It is simply a fact about the capacities of the human mind. But it has major consequences for every aspect of philosophy. Metaphorical thought is the principal tool that makes philosophical insight possible and that constrains the forms that philosophy can take.”

ReasonPhilosophyMetaphorAbstraction
Author:George Lakoff
Create image

“Many were incarcerated with the aberrant prosaic possibilities of ataraxia. Only the mentally sensitive few were cognizant of the nuisance to serenity and an actuality that lacked a balance betwixt havoc and sangfroid. The intellectual capabilities of the excellent idiosyncratic talents of a man with an agog outlook for de minimis fringe entities had left the portal ajar for the enlightened few, to get a glimpse of the obsecure reality that most had decided to claim socratic ignorance to evade inquiries.”

PhilosophySerenityAbstractionNihilismIntellectualismErraticSocratic Reasoning
Author:O.Z. Napaeae
Create image

“Abstraction, like poetry, does not dictate a clear narrative but rather, quietly offers a fragment, a piece of a mysteriously familiar narrative. In my paintings, there has continued to be a paring down of recognizable natural forms, which now have given way to a personal abstract vocabulary of shapes, colors and forms. The prominent use of abstraction has allowed me to distill and better communicate my emotions and ideas about life, nature and our respective place within it”

LifeIdeasNatureEmotionsAbstractAbstractionAbstract Art
Author:Nicholas Wilton
Create image

“This capacity for living easily and familiarly at an extraordinary level of abstraction is the source of modern man's power. With it he has transformed the planet, annihilated space, and trebled the world's population. But it is also a power which has, like everything human, its negative side, in the desolating sense of rootlessness, vacuity, and the lack of concrete feeling that assails modern man in his moments of real anxiety.”

PowerProgressAnxietyMeaningControlFeelingAbstractionAlienationHomelessnessModernityMeaninglessnessConcreteness
Book:Irrational Man: A Study in Existential Philosophy
Create image

“Monotheism and an absolute God define one another. The absolute is a mental construct, an abstract mental model. The absolute, whether it is a purest abstract essence or an extreme abstract measure, only exists in our minds as an abstraction. Furthermore, the absolute will only lead to the abandon of all measure and blind us to the relative interdependence of all things. The measure of knowledge of life is the knowledge of the measure of this relative interdependence.”

PhilosophyGodReligionThoughtConfusionAbsoluteAbstractionInterdependenceMonotheism
Book:The Human Consensus and The Ultimate Project Of Humanity
Create image

“Forgotten Stars. Time in the Flame. Missing Shard. The Only Rain. Door of the Memory. Waves in the Silk. Silent Birch. Thoughts of Lunatics. Secret of the Flowers. Soaring of the Souls. Heart in the Night. And a Kiss Unfolds. Forgotten Voyager. Voyage in the Words. Nothing of the World. Someone of the Hemisphere. Trembling Stones. Sucking Tears. The Next Gift. The World in the Kisses. Missing Angels. The Woman of the Girl. Guardian of the Rings. Thorn in the Pearl. Whispering Sword. Touching exclaim. Soul in the Truth. Heat in the Flame. Thy name, my name, Thy name! Came. Became. To Remain.”

LifePhilosophyLife LessonsAbstractAbstractionAbstract ArtAbstract Thinking
Book:Ginger and Honey
Create image

“... symbolic capitalists are professionals who traffic in symbols and rhetoric, images and narratives, data and analysis, ideas and abstraction (as opposed to workers engaged in manual forms of labor tied to physical goods and services). For instance, people who work in fields like education, science, tech, finance, media law, consulting, administration, and public policy are overwhelmingly symbolic capitalists.”

CapitalismWorkersRhetoricAbstractionAcademiaLeft WingSymbolic Capitalists
Book:We Have Never Been Woke: The Cultural Contradictions of a New Elite
Create image

“...all this abstraction is also potentially distancing. We don't see the labor that went into building our railroads or the civilizations that were wiped out in order to clear the land. We don't see the millennia of dinosaurs or plankton that went into our oil, the Chinese repetitive stress injuries that went into our iPhones, or any of the other time-intensive processes we can spend in an instant today. We tend to see math and science as a steady state of facts rather than as the accumulated knowledge of linear traditions. As Korzybski put it, we see further because we "stand on the shoulders" of the previous generation.”

HistoryTechnologyCapitalismAbstractionGlobalizationGlobal EconomyGlobalismIndustrialismPresent Shock
Book:Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now
Create image

“It must be this overarching commitment to what is really an abstraction, to one's children right or wrong, that can be even more fierce than the commitment to them as explicit, difficult people, and that can consequently keep you devoted to them when as individuals they disappoint. On my part it was this broad covenant with children-in-theory that I may have failed to make and to which I was unable to resort when Kevin finally tested my maternal ties to a perfect mathematical limit on Thursday. I didn't vote for parties, but for candidates. My opinions were as ecumenical as my larder, then still chock full of salsa verde from Mexico City, anchovies from Barcelona, lime leaves from Bangkok. I had no problem with abortion but abhorred capital punishment, which I suppose meant that I embraced the sanctity of life only in grown-ups. My environmental habits were capricious; I'd place a brick in our toilet tank, but after submitting to dozens of spit-in-the-air showers with derisory European water pressure, I would bask under a deluge of scalding water for half an hour. My closet wafter with Indian saris, Ghanaian wraparounds, and Vietnamese au dais. My vocabulary was peppered with imports -- gemutlich, scusa, hugge, mzungu. I so mixed and matched the planet that you sometimes worried I had no commitments to anything or anywhere, though you were wrong; my commitments were simply far-flung and obscenely specific. By the same token, I could not love a child; I would have to love this one. I was connected to the world by a multitude of threads, you by a few sturdy guide ropes. It was the same with patriotism: You loved the idea of the United States so much more powerfully than the country itself, and it was thanks to your embrace of the American aspiration that you could overlook the fact that your fellow Yankee parents were lining up overnight outside FAO Schwartz with thermoses of chowder to buy a limited release of Nintendo. In the particular dwells the tawdry. In the conceptual dwells the grand, the transcendent, the everlasting. Earthly countries and single malignant little boys can go to hell; the idea of countries and the idea of sons triumph for eternity. Although neither of us ever went to church, I came to conclude that you were a naturally religious person.”

ReligionParentingPatriotismAbstraction
Book:We Need To Talk About Kevin
Create image

“Fashion models and financial models are similar. They bear a similar relationship to everyday world. Like supermodels, financial models are idealized representations of the real world, they are not real, they don't quite work the way that the real world works. There is celebrity in both worlds. In the end, there is the same inevitable disappointment" - Satyajit Das, Traders, Guns & Money”

FinanceAbstractionModelingModelling
Book:Traders, Guns & Money: Knowns and Unknowns in the Dazzling World of Derivatives
Create image

“From the dawn of civilization, human beings have tried to find out order in the chaotic world surrounding them. It has however never been easy to find a solution to explain a given system while being a part of that system. The best bet is to find out the most fundamental components within the system and building a theory round these. In other words, a theory that is able to describe the world in totality has to keep the number of basic postulates it depends upon to zero or near zero.”

TheoryZeroAbstractionLawsPhysicalScaleTransactionBosonPostulation
Book:Abstraction In Theory - Laws Of Physical Transaction
Create image

“The principle of conservation of boson number inside a system is seen to follow directly from the Abstraction Model. The IBMs are seen to obey the Laws of Physical Transaction that follows from Zero-Postulation. The chaotic superfields at the requisite scaling-ratio yields necessary equation-parameters needed to describe them at that given scaling-ratio. This is seen to be independent of the choice of scale, but at smaller scaling-ratios, we have less loss of information. At a higher scale, we seem to have less number of parameters required to describe them.”

TheoryZeroAbstractionLawsPhysicalScaleTransactionBosonPostulation
Book:Abstraction In Theory - Laws Of Physical Transaction
Create image

“Abstraction automatically gives rise to optimized solutions within the universal set of all possible solutions, as has been shown in this book. It is these optimized solutions that make up and drive the non-abstract parts of the world, while the non-optimized solutions remain ‘hidden’ from the material world, inside the abstract world. Starting from a basis of no postulation, we build our theory. As we go on piling up possibilities, we come to a similar basis for understanding the four non-contact forces of nature known till date. The difference in ranges of these forces is explained from this basis in this book. Zero postulation or abstraction as the basis of theory synthesis allows us to explore even imaginary and chaotic non-favoured solutions as possibilities. With no postulation as the fundamental basis, we are thus able to pile up postulated results or favoured results, but not the other way round. We keep describing such implications of abstraction in this book. We deal with the abstraction of observable parameters involved in a given system”

MatterEnergyForceDarkTheoryZeroAbstractionLawsPhysicalScaleTransactionBosonPostulationFavored
Author:Subhajit Ganguly
Create image

“The revolutionary idea of contemporary art was that any object, any detail or fragment of the material world, could exert the same strange attraction and pose the same insoluble questions as were reserved in the past for a few rare aristocratic forms known as works of art. That is where true democracy lay: not in the accession of everyone to aesthetic enjoyment, but in the transaesthetic advent of a world in which every object would, without distinction, have its fifteen minutes of fame (particularly objects without distinction). All objects are equivalent, everything is a work of genius. With, as a corollary, the transformation of art and of the work itself into an object, without illusion or transcendence, a purely conceptual acting-out, generative of deconstructed objects which deconstruct us in their turn. No longer any face, any gaze, any human countenance or body in all this - organs without bodies, flows, molecules, the fractal. The relation to the 'artwork' is of the order of contamination, of contagion: you hook up to it, absorb or immerse yourself in it, exactly as in flows and networks. Metonymic sequence, chain reaction. No longer any real object in all this: in the ready-made it is no longer the object that's there, but the idea of the object, and we no longer find pleasure here in art, but in the idea of art. We are wholly in ideology. And, ultimately, the twofold curse of modem and contemporary art is summed up in the 'ready-made': the curse of an immersion in the real and banality, and that of a conceptual absorption in the idea of art.”

AddictionIdeologyAbstractionPop CultureSimulationBanalityContemporary ArtPandemicsDemocratization
Book:The Intelligence of Evil or the Lucidity Pact
Create image

“Today we demand justice for the oppressed. We no longer accept atrocities as the inescapable fate of the defenceless. We desire and expect a better future. But when confronted with the enormity of injustice and what it demands of us, we retreat into the familiar ritual of intellectualization and moral posturing, recycling lofty liberal ideals from a safe distance. We avoid the intimate knowledge of suffering without which we will never understand the imperative of human rights.”

InjusticeHuman RightsOppressionAbstractionDistancingIntellectualizationTheorizing
Book:In Search of A Better World: A Human Rights Odyssey
Create image

“The propensity to excessive simplification is indeed natural to the mind of man, since it is only by abstraction and generalisation, which necessarily imply the neglect of a multitude of particulars, that he can stretch his puny faculties so as to embrace a minute portion of the illimitable vastness of the universe. But if the propensity is natural and even inevitable, it is nevertheless fraught with peril, since it is apt to narrow and falsify our conception of any subject under investigation. To correct it partially - for to correct it wholly would require an infinite intelligence - we must endeavour to broaden our views by taking account of a wide range of facts and possibilities; and when we have done so to the utmost of our power, we must still remember that from the very nature of things our ideas fall immeasurably short of the reality.”

ScienceKnowledgeAbstractionGeneralizations
Book:The Magic Art and the Evolution of Kings, Part 1
Create image

“Burak Cem Coşkun’s Pumpkin Dessert with Tahini in the Cloud Chamber is a strikingly unique addition to contemporary literature that successfully merges the precision of theoretical physics with the lyrical soul of Anatolian philosophy. As the fourth volume in his *Science and Poetry* series, the work functions less like a traditional poetry collection and more like a "meta-text" where the author, a physicist by training, uses concepts like de-Sitter space, neutrinos, and topological solution spaces to explore deeply human themes of memory, existence, and nature. The structure is intellectually ambitious, moving from the "Fine Tuning" of cosmic scales to "Transcendental" reflections that feel rooted in the Ionian tradition of natural philosophers like Thales and Anaximander. What makes the reading experience so natural is how the author anchors these abstract scientific metaphors in physical locations—from the "glacial austerity of Stockholm" to the "mist-veiled nights of Tartu"—and ends with a fascinating philosophical "postulate" regarding Randomly Organized Structural Entities (ROSE) that attempts to unify biophysics with astrophysics through a geometry-centered framework. It is an evocative read for anyone interested in the intersection of mythos and logos, successfully arguing that the language of the universe is not just mathematical, but inherently poetic.”

PhilosophySciencePoetryScience FictionAbstractionGeometryLogosTopologyMythosIonia
Book:Pumpkin Dessert with Tahini in the Cloud Chamber - Without Walnuts & Neutrinoless: Science & Poetry, Volume IV
Create image

“I was reminded of a painter friend who had started her career by depicting scenes from life, mainly deserted rooms, abandoned houses and discarded photographs of women. Gradually, her work became more abstract, and in her last exhibition, her paintings were splashes of rebellious color, like the two in my living room, dark patches with little droplets of blue. I asked about her progress from modern realism to abstraction. Reality has become so intolerable, she said, so bleak, that all I can paint now are the colors of my dreams.”

ArtRealityDreamsAbstraction
Book:Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books
Create image

“We think of the number "five" as applying to appropriate groups of any entities whatsoever - to five fishes, five children, five apples, five days... We are merely thinking of those relationships between those two groups which are entirely independent of the individual essences of any of the members of either group. This is a very remarkable feat of abstraction; and it must have taken ages for the human race to rise to it”

ThinkingHumansChildrenTwoAgeIndividualNumbersRaceTakenFiveGroupsMembersLogicEssenceIndependentFishesCertaintyUncertaintyHuman RaceApplesReasoningAppropriateRemarkableEntityAbstractionFeatsOntology
Author:Alfred North Whitehead
Create image