Montesquieu Quotes

Abstraction is everybody's zero but nobody's nought.

Every race of people since time began who have attempted to describe God by words or painting, or by carvings, have conveyed their idea that the God who made them and shaped their destinies was symbolized in themselves. . .

Algebra is the metaphysics of arithmetic.

Philosophy! Empty thinking by ignorant conceited men who think they can digest without eating!

I find purer philosophy in a Poem than in a Conclusion of Geometry, a chemical analysis, or a physical law.

A mathematician, like a painter or a poet, is a maker of patterns. If his patterns are more permanent than theirs, it is because they are made with ideas.

Mathematics is a game played according to certain simple rules with meaningless marks on paper.

When people ask me what it is about Brazil and my work, it's not something that I can say literally. It's unidentifiable. It's like when you do research and things inspire you. If you're smart enough, then obviously you don't take it literally. The inspiration will come out later somehow.

I guess my experience with some stuff is kind of abstract.

As soon as there is language, generality has entered the scene.

We have no right to pick out all that is noblest and fairest in man, to project these qualities into space, and to call them God. We only thus create an ideal figure, a purified, ennobled, 'magnified' Man.

If the triangles made a god, they would give him three sides.

All human knowledge thus begins with intuitions, proceeds thence to concepts, and ends with ideas.

… mortals suppose that the gods are born (as they themselves are), and that they wear man's clothing and have human voice and body. But if cattle or lions had hands, so as to paint with their hands and produce works of art as men do, they would paint their gods and give them bodies in form like their own—horses like horses, cattle like cattle.

Men substitute words for reality and then argue about the words.

You don't eat a painting of an apple; you don't find it morally good. Instead, it tells you something strange about apples in themselves.

When a buddha is painted, not only a clay altar or lump of earth is used, but the thirty-two marks, a blade of grass, and the cultivation of wisdom for incalculable eons are used. As a Buddha has been painted on a single scroll in this way, all buddhas are painted buddhas, and all painted buddhas are actual buddhas.

The laws of Nature are written in the language of mathematics...the symbols are triangles, circles and other geometrical figures, without whose help it is impossible to comprehend a single word.

A lotta Christians wear crosses 'round their necks; do you think if Jesus comes back he ever wants to see another cross?

Philosophy [nature] is written in that great book which ever is before our eyes -- I mean the universe -- but we cannot understand it if we do not first learn the language and grasp the symbols in which it is written. The book is written in mathematical language, and the symbols are triangles, circles and other geometrical figures, without whose help it is impossible to comprehend a single word of it; without which one wanders in vain through a dark labyrinth.

A God made by man undoubtedly has need of man to make himself known to man.

The abstract kills, the concrete saves.

The most evident difference springs from the important part which is played in man by a relatively strong power of imagination and by the capacity to think, aided as it is by language and other symbolically devices.

We think not in words but in shadows of words.

The Western approach to reality is mostly through theory, and theory begins by denying reality - to talk about reality, to go around reality, to catch anything that attracts our sense-intellect and abstract it away from reality itself. Thus philosophy begins by saying that the outside world is not a basic fact, that its existence can be doubted and that every proposition in which the reality of the outside world is affirmed is not an evident proposition but one that needs to be divided, dissected and analyzed. It is to stand consciously aside and try to square a circle.