Abstract Thinking Quotes

I think it's important to reason from first principles rather than by analogy. The normal way we conduct our lives is we reason by analogy. [With analogy] we are doing this because it's like something else that was done, or it is like what other people are doing. [With first principles] you boil things down to the most fundamental truths…and then reason up from there.

Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited to all we now know and understand, while imagination embraces the entire world, and all there ever will be to know and understand.

Logic will get you from A to B. Imagination will take you everywhere.

As long as we think abstractly, as long as we find in patriotism and the exuberance of War our fulfillment, we will never understand those who do battle against us, or how we are perceived by them, or finally those who do battle for us and how we should respond to it all. We will never discover who we are. We will fail to confront the capacity we all have for violence.

The map is not the territory.

I don't engage in hypotheticals.

There is a basin in the mind where words float around on thought and thought on sound and sight. Then there is a depth of thought untouched by words, and deeper still a gulf of formless feelings untouched by thought.

I don't want to be a tree; I want to be its meaning.

Mathematics is not just a language. Mathematics is a language plus reasoning.

I'm not a natural leader. I'm too intellectual; I'm too abstract; I think too much.

To deal with a 14-dimensional space, visualize a 3-D space and say 'fourteen' to yourself very loudly. Everyone does it.

I maintain that anyone who still refuses to see, for instance, a horse galloping on a tomato, must be an idiot. A tomato is also a child's balloon - Surrealism, again, having suppressed the word "like."

My work became an exploration of non-intention.

Think how hard physics would be if particles could think

I am an academic, and I have always made it clear that my ultimate home is in the realm of ideas.

When ideas float in our mind, without any reflection or regard of the understanding, it is that which the French call reverie.

We may always depend on it that algebra, which cannot be translated into good English and sound common sense, is bad algebra.

As with most of my work, I started from the abstract, from research, building an intellectual model that slowly became internalized when the characters came alive. It's fascinating what happens to the model you've so assiduously assembled when characters are allowed to run rampant: things you thought essential are broken and other things are vastly improved.

Intuition is a very powerful thing, more powerful than intellect.

Theories, for me, are just about freeing your mind. It doesn't mean the theory is going to work like a scientific theory works. It's about freeing your mind and making you think a different way.

When you look at a wall spotted with stains...you may discover a resemblance to various landscapes, beautiful with mountains, rivers, rocks, trees. Or again, you may see battles and figures in action, or strange faces and costumes, and an endless variety of objects which you could reduce to complete and well-drawn figures.

Most of my work is in my mind.

Politicians of all stripes are always in danger at looking at every problem from an abstract point of view or being briefed by officials, academics, or economists who know every science but the science of human nature.

Philosophers are not honest enough in their work, although they make a lot of virtuous noise when the problem of truthfulness is touched even remotely. They all pose as if they had discovered and reached their real opinions through the self-development of a cold, pure, divinely unconcerned dialectic...; while at bottom it is an assumption, a hunch, indeed a kind of "inspiration" most often a desire of the heart that has been filtered and made abstract that they defend with reasons they have sought after the fact.

Man has such a predilection for systems and abstract deductions that he is ready to distort truth intentionally, he is ready to deny the evidence of his senses only to justify his logic.