Abstraction Quotes

The dynamic element in my philosophy, taken as a whole, can be seen as an obstinate and untiring battle against the spirit of abstraction. (Gabriel Marcel)
Pure drawing is an abstraction. Drawing and colour are not distinct, everything in nature is coloured. View quote
Paul Cézanne
Dancing is the loftiest, the most moving, the most beautiful of the arts, because it is no mere translation or abstraction from life; it is life itself. View quote
Havelock Ellis
Women's rights is not only an abstraction, a cause; it is also a personal affair. It is not only about us; it is also about me and you. Just the two of us. View quote
Toni Morrison
It is terrible to destroy a person's picture of himself in the interests of truth or some other abstraction. View quote
Doris Lessing
Such abstraction which refuses to accept the given universe of facts as the final context of validation, such "transcending” analysis of the facts in the light of their arrested and denied possibilities, pertains to the very structure of social theory. View quote
Herbert Marcuse
Those who tell you that the territorial question is an abstraction, that you can never colonize another territory without the African slavetrade, are both deaf and blind to the history of the last sixty years. View quote
Robert Toombs
.. the word 'abstract' comes from the light tower of the philosophers.... one of their spotlights that they have particularly focused on 'Art'....(abstraction was) not so much what you could paint but rather what you could not paint. You could not paint a house or a tree or a mountain. It was then that subject matter came into existence as something you ought not have. View quote
Willem de Kooning
The career of a young theoretical physicist consists of treating the harmonic oscillator in ever-increasing levels of abstraction. View quote
Sidney Coleman
This new plastic idea will ignore the particulars of appearance, that is to say, natural form and color. On the contrary, it should find its expression in the abstraction of form and color, that is to say, in the straight line and the clearly defined primary color. View quote
Piet Mondrian
Everything 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 Chirico)
Poetry is an abstraction bloodied. View quote
Wallace Stevens
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. View quote
Donald Knuth
When scientists need to explain difficult points of theory, illustration by hypothetical example - rather than by total abstraction - works well (perhaps indispensably) as a rhetorical device. Such cases do not function as speculations in the pejorative sense - as silly stories that provide insight into complex mechanisms - but rather as idealized illustrations to exemplify a difficult point of theory. (Other fields, like philosophy and the law, use such conjectural cases as a standard device.) View quote
Stephen Jay Gould
The beauty of physics lies in the extent to which seemingly complex and unrelated phenomena can be explained and correlated through a high level of abstraction by a set of laws which are amazing in their simplicity. View quote
Melvin Schwartz
I like thought which preserves a whiff of flesh and blood, and I prefer a thousand times an idea rising from sexual tension or nervous depression to empty abstraction. View quote
Emil Cioran
An administrator in a bureaucratic world is a man who can feel big by merging his non-entity in an abstraction. A real person in touch with real things inspires terror in him. View quote
Marshall McLuhan
The physicist who states a law of nature with the aid of a mathematical formula is abstracting a real feature of a real material world, even if he has to speak of numbers, vectors, tensors, state-functions, or whatever to make the abstraction. View quote
Hilary Putnam
It is easy now to communicate with people through abstraction, and particularly so in sculpture. Since the whole body reacts to its presence, people become themselves a living part of the whole. View quote
Barbara Hepworth
Serial or sex murder, like fetishism, is a perversion of male intelligence. It is a criminal abstraction, masculine in its deranged egoism and orderliness. It is the asocial equivalent of philosophy, mathematics and music. There is no female Mozart because there is no female Jack the Ripper. View quote
Camille Paglia
We have tried to fit man into abstraction, but he does not fit. (Mark Tobey)
Yes, there was an element of abstraction and unreality in misfortune. But when an abstraction starts to kill you, you have to get to work on it. View quote
Albert Camus
Mystic equality lies in abstraction, not in having or in doing, which are processes. In function and process, one man, one part, must of necessity be subordinate to another. It is a condition of being. View quote
D. H. Lawrence
[...], indeed nothing so tires a person as having to struggle, not with himself, but with an abstraction. View quote
José Saramago
Don't copy nature too closely. Art is an abstraction; as you dream amide nature, extrapolate art from it and concentrate on what you will create as a result. View quote
Paul Gauguin