Popular quotes about Abstraction! Wisdom and inspiration are here!
When truth is nothing but truth, it's unnatural, it's an abstraction that resembles nothing in the real world.
Aldous HuxleyWisdom... is often an abstraction associated not with fact or reality but with the man who asserts it and the manner of its assertion.
John Kenneth GalbraithThe Hindus have cultivated the power of analysis and abstraction. No nation has yet produced a grammar like that of Panini.
Swami VivekanandaFrom where I sit, battles are hard. Iโve written my share. Sometimes I employ the privateโs viewpoint, very up close and personal, dropping the reader right into the middle of the carnage. Thatโs vivid and visceral, but of necessity chaotic, and it is easy to lose all sense of the battle as a whole. Sometimes I go with the generalโs point of view instead, looking down from on high, seeing lines and flanks and reserves. That gives a great sense of the tactics, of how the battle is won or lost, but can easily slide into abstraction.
George R. R. MartinIf, therefore, man has come into the world to search for God and, if he has found Him, to adhere to Him and to find repose in adhering to Him-man cannot search for Him and attain Him in this sensible and corporeal world, since God is spirit rather than body, and cannot be attained in intellectual abstraction, since one is able to conceive nothing similar to God, as he asserts-how can one, therefore, search for Him in order to find Him?
Nicholas of CusaAt some point I realized that the text was the painting and that everything else was extraneous. The painting became the act of writing a text on a canvas, but in all my work, text turns into abstraction.
Glenn LigonAbsolute honesty is as absurd an abstraction as an absolute temperature or an absolute value.
George Bernard ShawIn my experience, you either have encapsulation and abstraction or you have neither. There is no middle ground.
Steve McConnellThe ideal trademark is one that is pushed to its utmost limits in terms of abstraction and ambiguity, yet is still readable. Trademarks are usually metaphors of one kind or another. And are, in a certain sense, thinking made visible.
Saul BassWe have also obtained a glimpse of another crucial idea about languages and program design. This is the approach of statified design, the notion that a complex system should be structured as a sequence of levels that are described using a sequence of languages. Each level is constructed by combining parts that are regarded as primitive at that level, and the parts constructed at each level are used as primitives at the next level. The language used at each level of a stratified design has primitives, means of combination, and means of abstraction appropriate to that level of detail.
Hal AbelsonTime is an abstraction which, on earth, exists only for the human brain it has evolved.
Charles LindberghI'm not a person who writes really abstract things with oblique references. I look at abstraction like I look at condiments. Give me some Tabasco sauce, some ketchup, some mayonnaise. I love all of that. Put it on a trumpet. I've just got to have the ketchup and Tabasco sauce. That's my attitude about musical philosophy.
Wynton MarsalisEverything has two aspects: the current aspect, which we see nearly always and which ordinary men see, and the ghostly and metaphysical aspect, which only rare individuals may see in moments of clairvoyance and metaphysical abstraction.
Giorgio de ChiricoThe Geometer has the special privilege to carry out, by abstraction, all constructions by means of the intellect. Who, then, would wish to prevent me from freely considering figures hanging on a balance imagined to be at an infinite distance beyond the confines of the world?
Evangelista TorricelliReflective abstraction, however, is based not on individual actions but on coordinated actions.
Jean PiagetOne might suppose that reality must be held to at all costs. However, though that may be the moral thing to do, it is not necessarily the most useful thing to do. The Greeks themselves chose the ideal over the real in their geometry and demonstrated very well that far more could be achieved by consideration of abstract line and form than by a study of the real lines and forms of the world; the greater understanding achieved through abstraction could be applied most usefully to the very reality that was ignored in the process of gaining knowledge.
Isaac AsimovI think I've learned a lot about how to make movies, and particularly about how to edit movies by thinking about how similar problems are resolved in other forms. The issues in all forms are the same in an abstract sense, aren't they? Characterization, abstraction, metaphor, passage of time... Whether it's a movie, a novel, a play, or a poem, those issues exist. And each person resolves them differently.
Frederick WisemanJazz musicians like John Coltrane needed these very clear titles for their abstract music, and your decision to bring voices into your music as a way to tap into content. It's related to the way my text-based work still functions as abstraction for me. If I repeat a sentence down a canvas, the text starts to smudge and disappear. It essentially becomes an abstract piece. The meaning of the text is still there.
Glenn LigonEssentially, perspective is a form of abstraction. It simplifies the relationship between eye, brain and object. It is an ideal view, imagined as being seen by a one-eyed, motionless person who is clearly detached from what he sees. It makes a God of the spectator, who becomes the person on whom the whole world converges, the Unmoved Onlooker.
Robert HughesA conscious decision to eliminate certain details and include selective bits of personal experiences or perceptual nuances, gives the painting more of a multi-dimension than when it is done directly as a visual recording. This results in a kind of abstraction... and thus avoids the pitfalls of mere decoration.
Wayne Thiebaud