#abstraction

Men do not fight for flag or country, for the Marine Corps or glory or any other abstraction. They fight for one another. And if you came through this ordeal, you would age with dignity. ↗

— William Manchester

#age #another #any #came #corps

Abstract words such as glory, honor, courage, or hallow were obscene beside the concrete names of villages, the numbers of roads, the names of rivers, the numbers of regiments and the dates. ↗

— Ernest Hemingway

#courage #glory #honor #courage

abstraction, n. Love is one kind of abstraction. And then there are those nights when I sleep alone, when I curl into a pillow that isn't you, when I hear the tiptoe sounds that aren't yours. It's not as if I can conjure you up completely. I must embrace the idea of you instead. ↗

— David Levithan

#love #lover-s-dictionary #love

Dancing is the loftiest, the most moving, the most beautiful of the arts, because it is no mere translation or abstraction from life; it is life itself. ↗

— Havelock Ellis

#arts #beautiful #because #dancing #itself

It is terrible to destroy a person's picture of himself in the interests of truth or some other abstraction. ↗

— Doris Lessing

#destroy #himself #interests #other #person

Whatever life may really be, it is to us an abstraction: for the word is a generalised term to signify that which is common to all animals and plants, and which is not directly operative in the inorganic world. ↗

— Oliver Joseph Lodge

#common #directly #inorganic #life #may

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

— Criss Jami

#bad #beginning #clever #confusion #declaration

Washington isn't a city, it's an abstraction. ↗

— Dylan Thomas

#city #washington

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