#abstraction

Everything at some point has been declared the root of all evil. ↗

— Criss Jami

#bad #beginning #clever #confusion #declaration

The Geometer has the special privilege to carry out, by abstraction, all constructions by means of the intellect. Who, then, would wish to prevent me from freely considering figures hanging on a balance imagined to be at an infinite distance beyond the confines of the world? ↗

— Evangelista Torricelli

#balance #beyond #carry #confines #considering

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

We are so much the victims of abstraction that with the Earth in flames we can barely rouse ourselves to wander across the room and look at the thermostat. ↗

— Terence McKenna

#across #barely #earth #flames #look

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

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

Reflective abstraction, however, is based not on individual actions but on coordinated actions. ↗

— Jean Piaget

#actions #based #coordinated #however #individual

From the smallest necessity to the highest religious abstraction, from the wheel to the skyscraper, everything we are and everything we have comes from one attribute of man - the function of his reasoning mind. ↗

— Ayn Rand

#attribute #comes #everything #function #highest

Colour is a power which directly influences the soul. ↗

— Wassily Kandinsky

#art #paintings #science #art

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