Abstract Ideas Quotes

Universal history is the history of a few metaphors.

I have a 2-year-old son, and I know I'm dealing with a big, grand word when I can't point to the thing when I define it. Right? If he wants to know what a chair is, I can point to the chair. If he wants to know what religion is, I can't point to anything in particular. The same is true of the state.

I've always enjoyed mathematics. It is the most precise and concise way of expressing any idea.

I've learnt over the years to always be thinking of titles and ideas that I try to put across with just a couple of words. It's the difficult part when you're writing things that are basically abstract.

Inspiring visions rarely (I'm tempted to say never) include numbers.

Where ideas are real and reality is shadow.

I'm not into this detail stuff. I'm more concepty.

To philosophize means to make vivid.

I don't write songs about a specific, elusive thing.

I get satisfaction out of seeing stuff that makes real change in the real world. We need a lot more of that and a lot less abstract stuff.

I think truth as an idea should be left to the philosophers and perhaps religious leaders and politicians, and professional people who deal with that idea.

If particulars are to have meaning, there must be universals.

To me, a story can be both concrete and abstract, or a concrete story can hold abstractions. And abstractions are things that really can't be said so well with words.

Just because I try to read a lot of stuff doesn't mean I can fully conceptualize all of these intense, big, abstract ideas.

It's slightly complicated for people to grasp the idea of a head of state in human form.

Ideas do not make a movement; they are themselves merely the product of concrete situations, the intellectual precipitate of particular conditions of life. Movements arise only from the immediate and practical necessities of social life and are never the result of purely abstract ideas. But they acquire their irresistible force and their inner certainty of victory only when they are vitalised by a great idea, which gives them life and intellectual content

I have titles floating around in my head; I have sculptures floating around in my head. It's like a collage.

Imagination is more important than information. Einstein said that, and he should know. And they come. And they look. And we push. And they fly. We to stay and die on our beds. They to go and die howsoever, yet inspiring those who come after them to find their own edge. And fly.

I have lots of strange ideas in the back of my mind.

Movement, or physical activity, is thus an essential factor in intellectual growth, which depends upon the impressions received from outside. Through movement we come in contact with external reality, and it is through these contacts that we eventually acquire even abstract ideas.

Any man who afflicts the human race with ideas must be prepared to see them misunderstood.

And I believe that the Binomial Theorem and a Bach Fugue are, in the long run, more important than all the battles of history.

Freedom is an abstract offshoot. You can't describe freedom. How can you describe it? I tried and I failed.

What persuades men and women to mistake each other from time to time for gods or vermin is ideology. One can understand well enough how human beings may struggle and murder for good material reasons - reasons connected, for instance, with their physical survival. It is much harder to grasp how they may come to do so in the name of something as apparently abstract as ideas. Yet ideas are what men and women live by, and will occasionally die for.

I'm a very conceptual writer.