#abstraction

In the end idealism annoyed Bouvard. ‘I don’t want any more of it: the famous cogito is a bore. The ideas of things are taken for the things themselves. What we barely understand is explained by means of words that we do not understand at all! Substance, extension, force, matter and soul, are all so many abstractions, figments of the imagination. As for God, it is impossible to know how he is, or even if he is! Once he was the cause of wind, thunder, revolutions. Now he is getting smaller. Besides, I don’t see what use he is. ↗

— Gustave Flaubert

#god #idealism #language #religion #spirituality

It always seems as though the definition of love will remain debatable by an opinionated world. ↗

— Criss Jami

#conflict #confusion #debate #definition #disagreement

One nation, under God, with consciousness – the practical man serves the highest abstraction with juggling training. ↗

— Bauvard

#consciousness #funny #god #humor #juggling

Two elements are needed to form a truth - a fact and an abstraction. ↗

— Remy de Gourmont

#elements #fact #form #needed #truth

The first type of abstraction from objects I shall refer to as simple abstraction, but the second type I shall call reflective abstraction, using this term in a double sense. ↗

— Jean Piaget

#call #double #first #i #objects

Pure drawing is an abstraction. Drawing and colour are not distinct, everything in nature is coloured. ↗

— Paul Cezanne

#colour #coloured #distinct #drawing #everything

I would put myself in the attitude to look in the eye an abstract truth, and I cannot. I blench and withdraw on this side and on that. I seem to know what he meant who said, No man can see God face to face and live. ↗

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

#abstraction #fear #fear-of-truth #god #truth

Abstraction can provide stumbling blocks for people of strange intelligence. ↗

— Gustave Flaubert

#intelligence #intelligence

The propensity to excessive simplification is indeed natural to the mind of man, since it is only by abstraction and generalisation, which necessarily imply the neglect of a multitude of particulars, that he can stretch his puny faculties so as to embrace a minute portion of the illimitable vastness of the universe. But if the propensity is natural and even inevitable, it is nevertheless fraught with peril, since it is apt to narrow and falsify our conception of any subject under investigation. To correct it partially - for to correct it wholly would require an infinite intelligence - we must endeavour to broaden our views by taking account of a wide range of facts and possibilities; and when we have done so to the utmost of our power, we must still remember that from the very nature of things our ideas fall immeasurably short of the reality. ↗

— James George Frazer

#generalisation #knowledge #science #art

By object is meant some element in the complex whole that is defined in abstraction from the whole of which it is a distinction. ↗

— John Dewey

#complex #defined #distinction #element #meant