Quotes About Abstraction

I have tried, with little success, to get some of my friends to understand my amazement that the abstraction of integers for counting is both possible and useful. Is it not remarkable that 6 sheep plus 7 sheep makes 13 sheep; that 6 stones plus 7 stones make 13 stones? Is it not a miracle that the universe is so constructed that such a simple abstraction as a number is possible? To me this is one of the strongest examples of the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics. Indeed, I find it both strange and unexplainable.

If I wrote about "being [abstraction]" I would be ignoring existential issues (such as death, limited-time, the arbitrary nature of the universe, the mystery of consciousness) that I feel affect me most in my life and think about most of the time. Another reason is that it doesn't seem specific or accurate, to me, to write about "being [abstraction]." I think there are some other reasons.

I think I'm just generally more interested in figuration than abstraction. I think that painting abstraction often feels like painting colors to me, whereas portraits always feel like something connected. I like the exchange, the collaborative aspect of sitter and subject for sure.

Wisdom... is often an abstraction associated not with fact or reality but with the man who asserts it and the manner of its assertion.

No religion can be considered in abstraction from its followers, or even from its various types of followers.

Do not copy nature. Art is an abstraction. Rather, bring your art forth by dreaming in front of her and think more of creation.

Keep Hope alive, particularly if Hope is the name of a very cute puppy and not some ill-defined abstraction that is in fact code for big government.

Abstraction allows man to see with his mind what he cannot physically see with his eyes... Abstract art enables the artist to perceive beyond the tangible, to extract the infinite out of the finite. It is the emancipation of the mind. It is an explosion into unknown areas.

Abstraction is one of the greatest visionary tools ever invented by human beings to imagine, decipher, and depict the world.

Organizing time is exactly like organizing space. Just as a closet is a limited amount of space into which you must fit a certain number of objects, a schedule is a limited space into which you must fit a certain number of tasks. Each day and each week is simply a container, a storage unit with a definite capacity. The trick is to treat time not as an abstraction but as something solid that you can hold on to and move around.

If the photographer is to create works that will stand for his spirit in the same way as artists in other genres, he must first - having no ready-made, abstract components such as works and sounds - supply other means to abstraction instead.

Malevitch discovered abstraction as an experimental principle that can propel creative work to previously unheard levels of invention; this abstract work allowed much greater levels of creativity.

I think, though, that perspective-awareness may follow from a kind of speaking that also came into my work more recently - the "assay" poems (some labeled that, some not) that engage an abstraction or object from multiple angles.

I'm trying not to delve into my world of abstraction and self-indulgence. But I haven't. When I sit down and I try not to [be abstract], it comes out really forced and awkward.

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.

Whether a photo or music, or a drawing or anything else I might do—it’s ultimately all an abstraction of my peculiar experience.

Time isn't made of anything. It is an abstraction. Just a meaning that we impose upon motion.

Only in relationship can you know yourself, not in abstraction, and certainly not in isolation.

Joseph Conrad and Heart of Darkness loom huge in my development as a writer. I think I'm always trying to write Heart of Darkness - trying to explode an abstraction in concrete terms, although I am aware that Conrad's story has a bit of baggage that I'd rather avoid in my work.

The only real life is the collective life of the race; individual life has no existence except as an abstraction.

Every work of art is an abstraction from time; it denies the reality of change and decay and death.

Money is becoming increasingly plastic and digital. If there is a major disaster, let's say an asteroid strike, we'll go back to trading meats and furs. We won't need an abstraction, a dollar bill, but real tangible goods to survive.

There are many agreements across the so-called "world religions," at a certain level of abstraction. But when it comes to applying them in concrete situations they may lead to incompatible decisions. As an example, some people think that Christian ideas of sexual modesty suggest that homosexuals should be locked up, some people think that they mean that the churches should recongize gay marriages. But everyone believes in sexual modesty. I think there are universal moral truths, whether or not everyone accepts them. Here's one very low level but important one: it's very bad to torture people.

The truly modern artist is aware of abstraction in an emotion of beauty.

Agape's object is always the concrete individual, not some abstraction called humanity. Love of humanity is easy because humanity does not surprise you with inconvenient demands. You never find humanity on your doorstep, stinking and begging.

There's always a joy in newness as a painter, and in sub-Saharan Africa, I encountered different realities with regard to light and how it bounces across the skin. The way that blues and purples come into play. In India and Sri Lanka, it was no different. It became a moment in which I had an opportunity to learn as a painter how to create the body in full form, and that's a very material and aesthetic thing. This is not conceptual. It's all an abstraction.

Arabs are a complete abstraction in the propaganda world and all the death and destruction is completely unreal to Americans.

What I hope is I'll eventually be seen as an actual individual, not as some abstraction - an art dealer running a museum.

But we must not underestimate the potency of the mathematical process of abstraction. A surprising variety of things happen to have both magnitude and direction and to combine according to the parallelogram law; and many of them are not at all reminiscent of journeys.

Men do not fight for flag or country, for the Marine Corps or glory or any other abstraction. They fight for one another. And if you came through this ordeal, you would age with dignity.