#abstract

You can define a net two ways, depending on your point of view. Normally you would say it is a meshed instrument designed to catch fish. But you could, with no great injury to logic, reverse the image and define the net as a jocular lexicographer once did: he called it a collection of holes tied together with string. ↗

— Julian Barnes

#language #design

There is no such thing as justice in the abstract; it is merely a compact between men. ↗

— Epicurus

#abstract #between #compact #justice #merely

I like the fact that music is more abstract. ↗

— Bryan Ferry

#fact #i #like #more #music

As you see, I do not treat the creation of fiction, that to say the invention and development of fantasies, as a form of abstract thought. I don't wish to deny the uses of the intellect, but sometimes one has the intuition that the intellect by itself will lead one nowhere. ↗

— J. M. Coetzee

#abstract thought #creation #deny #development #fantasies

My response, a dubious and hesitant one, is that it has been and may continue to be, in the time that is left to me, more productive to live out the question than to try to answer it in abstract terms. ↗

— J. M. Coetzee

#answer #been #continue #dubious #hesitant

Exclusively of the abstract sciences, the largest and worthiest portion of our knowledge consists of aphorisms: and the greatest and best of men is but an aphorism. ↗

— Samuel Taylor Coleridge

#aphorism #best #consists #exclusively #greatest

Those who tell you that the territorial question is an abstraction, that you can never colonize another territory without the African slavetrade, are both deaf and blind to the history of the last sixty years. ↗

— Robert Toombs

#african #another #blind #both #deaf

Sometimes a symbol holds more power than the thing it represents. Like the symbol for Thing, the one I created that is confusing and abstract and makes people ask, What is that thing? And I always reply, “If you already knew, why did you ask? ↗

— Jarod Kintz

#funny #power #symbols #funny

Beauty is in the mind, not the eye. ↗

— Agnes Martin

#beauty

But this emphasis would be lavished in vain, if it served, in your opinion, only to abstract a general type from phenomena whose particularity in our work would remain the essential thing for you, and whose original arrangement could be broken up only artificially. ↗

— Jacques Lacan

#arrangement #artificially #broken #could #emphasis