#abstraction

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

— Criss Jami

#bad #beginning #clever #confusion #declaration

The 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 Torricelli

#balance #beyond #carry #confines #considering

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. ↗

— Toni Morrison

#about #abstraction #affair #also #cause

In the end idealism annoyed Bouvard. ‘I don’t want any more of it: the famous cogito is a bore. The ideas of things are taken for the things themselves. What we barely understand is explained by means of words that we do not understand at all! Substance, extension, force, matter and soul, are all so many abstractions, figments of the imagination. As for God, it is impossible to know how he is, or even if he is! Once he was the cause of wind, thunder, revolutions. Now he is getting smaller. Besides, I don’t see what use he is. ↗

— Gustave Flaubert

#god #idealism #language #religion #spirituality

We call those works of art concrete that came into being on the basis of their inherent resources and rules - without external borrowing from natural phenomena, without transforming those phenomena, in other words: not by abstraction. ↗

— Max Bill

#art #basis #being #borrowing #call

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. ↗

— William Manchester

#age #another #any #came #corps

It is so wearisome having to represent things. That is why I refuse to look at abstract art. It is much too suggestive of the style of my thoughts, and I never think about my thoughts. ↗

— Bauvard

#funny #humor #representation #thoughts #art

Abstract words such as glory, honor, courage, or hallow were obscene beside the concrete names of villages, the numbers of roads, the names of rivers, the numbers of regiments and the dates. ↗

— Ernest Hemingway

#courage #glory #honor #courage

Abstraction can provide stumbling blocks for people of strange intelligence. ↗

— Gustave Flaubert

#intelligence #intelligence

abstraction, n. Love is one kind of abstraction. And then there are those nights when I sleep alone, when I curl into a pillow that isn't you, when I hear the tiptoe sounds that aren't yours. It's not as if I can conjure you up completely. I must embrace the idea of you instead. ↗

— David Levithan

#love #lover-s-dictionary #love