Abstraction Quotes

Love is not some complex, mystical abstraction. It is something accessible and human that we learn through our everyday experience, as often at times of failure as in moments of ecstasy.

When a man knows that the abstraction ten exists - nothing on earth can stop him from looking for the fact of eleven.

Two elements are needed to form a truth - a fact and an abstraction

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

Oh abstractions are just abstract until they have an ache in them.

In my experience, you either have encapsulation and abstraction or you have neither. There is no middle ground.

Abstraction is a mental process we use when trying to discern what is essential or relevant to a problem; it does not require a belief in abstract entities.

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

ADMINISTRATION, n. An ingenious abstraction in politics, designed to receive the kicks and cuffs due to the premier or president. A man of straw, proof against bad-egging and dead-catting.

To make someone an icon is to make him an abstraction, and abstractions are incapable of vital communication with living people.

The pendulum of mathematics swings back and forth towards abstraction and away from it with a timing that remains to be estimated.

Freedom which has genuine meaning is more than a timeless abstraction, more than an absence of restraints.

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.

Abstraction generally involves implication, suggestion and mystery, rather than obvious description.

True to her inveterate habit, rationalism reverts to 'principles,' and thinks that when an abstraction once is named, we own an oracular solution.

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

I still believe in abstraction, but now I know that one ends with abstraction, not starts with it

To be an abstraction does not mean that an entity is nothing. It merely means that its existence is only a factor of a more concrete element of nature.

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

All art is an abstraction to some degree.

The desert is no longer a landscape, it is a pure form produced by the abstraction of all others.

Most American cities shop to their best advantage when seen from a height or from a distance, at a point where the ugliness of the buildings dissolves into the beauty of an abstraction.

If I choose abstraction over reality, it is because I consider it the lesser chaos.

Even an abstract form has to have a likeness.

It always seems as though the definition of love will remain debatable by an opinionated world.

Abstraction can provide stumbling blocks for people of strange intelligence.

Everything at some point has been declared the root of all evil.

When truth is nothing but truth, it's unnatural, it's an abstraction that resembles nothing in the real world.

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

I've never read a book on shape. I've read books on gesture; I've read tons of books on color, surface, field, ground, representation, abstraction. But I've never read a book on what a shape is.

Any community that remains an abstraction is an easy target for prejudice and cruelty, but any community that becomes fully humanized is much harder to treat in that way.

I wouldn't say I'm a very technical [guitar] player. I'm more intuitive - it's always more about chasing an abstraction.

If I see a human body on the stage, I don't see it as an abstraction. I see it as a body.

Abstraction in photography is ridiculous, and is only an imitation of painting. We stopped imitating painters a hundred years ago, so to imitate them in this day and age is laughable.

The cartooning was always just an abstraction. It was an income. It was making me famous. It was allowing me to go and do other things that I'd wanted to do.

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.

Abstraction is an exercise in a pre-assured failure. It is a futile attempt to communicate the non-communicable

Home is where the heart is, we say, rubbing the flint of one abstraction against another.

The psychological profiling [of a programmer] is mostly the ability to shift levels of abstraction, from low level to high level. To see something in the small and to see something in the large.

Abstraction is itself an abstract word and has no single meaning ... Every word in our language is abstract, because it represents something else.

What I actually admire in Perl is its ability to provide a very successful abstraction of the horrible mess that is collectively called Unix.

The Geometer has the special privilege to carry out, by abstraction, all constructions by means of the intellect.

Absolute honesty is as absurd an abstraction as an absolute temperature or an absolute value.

Every man has to learn the points of the compass again as often as he awakes, whether from sleep or any abstraction.

Abstraction means getting away from a visual interpretation but nearer to an emotional one.

No one has ever seen the self. It has no visible shape, nor does it occupy measurable space. It is an abstraction, like other abstractions equally elusive: the individual, the mind, the society

To think of abstraction as an end in itself is undoubtedly letting oneself be led into a cul-de-sac and can only lead to exhaustion and impotence.

In a time when our nation is engaged in multiple, long-term wars, it's critical that "the military" not become an abstraction to the vast majority of Americans who are not participants.

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

Abstraction brings the world into more complex, variable relations; it can extract beauty, alternative topographies, ugliness, and intense actualities from seeming nothingness.