#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

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

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

I felt like my parents were always involved with abstraction, and I wanted to do something very specific. ↗

— Lena Dunham

#always #felt #i #involved #like

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

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