Abstractness Quotes

Nobody really thinks who does not abstract from that which is given, who does not relate the facts to the factors which have made them, who does not - in his mind - undo the facts. Abstractness is the very life of thought, the token of its authenticity.

Law has no skin, reason has no nostrils.

She was good at playing abstract confusion in the same way that a midget is good at being short.

I don't know that I could really define love. I can't . . . again, it's like trying to define what this creative force is. It's beyond my ability to really define. If I can define it, then it's not it. We're right back to that thing again.

The soul is an illusion.

Blue has no dimensions, it is beyond dimensions, whereas the other colours are not....All colours arouse specific associative ideas, psychologically material or tangible, while blue suggests at most the sea and sky, and they, after all, are in actual, visible nature what is most abstract.

The more uncompromisingly specific you are the more you end up touching the bigger universal truths.

Modernism: the books are as hard to understand as life itself.

whatever is profound loves masks; what is most profound even hates image and parable.

I like to keep the meanings in my work flowing and open.

Behold the pre-prophetic symbols of the planes of Never. Behold, behold this thisness! This isness.

When people ask what 'American Pie' is about, they're missing the point. The song isn't about the lines themselves - it's about what is between the lines. The song is about what isn't there.

Existence is larger than any model that is not itself the exact size of existence (which has no size).

It's not a question of size, of whether it's a small or a big thing, but of what it has the power to incarnate.

The essence of life will never be captured by even the greatest of formulas.

Ultimate Reality, if such an entity can be postulated, is ineffable.

The trouble with talking about irony is, it's such a slippery thing that the second you start talking about it, you're a better example of it than you are an analyst.

It is the perennial youthfulness of mathematics itself which marks it off with a disconcerting immortality from the other sciences.

Metaphysics is a restaurant where they give you a thirty thousand page menu, and no food.

Beauty, like all other qualities presented to human experience, is relative; and the definition of it becomes unmeaning and useless in proportion to its abstractness. To define beauty not in the most abstract, but in the most concrete terms possible, not to find a universal formula for it, but the formula which expresses most adequately this or that special manifestation of it, is the aim of the true student of aesthetics.

Abstractness, sometimes hurled as a reproach at mathematics, is its chief glory and its surest title to practical usefulness. It is also the source of such beauty as may spring from mathematics.

I do listen to music. Movie scores, exclusively, because it's all about mood and nonspecificity. I love the way modern movie scoring is all about nonspecificity. You know, if I shuffled the tracks from 'Inception,' I challenge you to tell me which is which.

The abstractness of modern art has to do with how much an enlightened mind rejects of the contemporary social order.

A mathematical point is the most indivisble and unique thing which art can present.

Nothing is so useless as a general maxim.