At some level, you have to be able to say, "This is my task. " It's in small, local ways that you keep yourself alive and refresh ideas that are always going into dead abstraction.
All non-trivial abstractions, to some degree, are leaky.
We lay down a fundamental principle of generalization by abstraction: The existence of analogies between central features of various theories implies the existence of a general theory which underlies the particular theories and unifies them with respect to those central features.
I wouldn't say I'm a very technical [guitar] player. I'm more intuitive - it's always more about chasing an abstraction.
Time isn't made of anything. It is an abstraction. Just a meaning that we impose upon motion.
Pure drawing is an abstraction.
Someone who is incapable of drawing, and cannot master line or colour perspective can always express themselves in some form of 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.
When truth is nothing but truth, it's unnatural, it's an abstraction that resembles nothing in the real world.
Ingres was one of those artists to whom the outline was something sacred and magical, and the reason is that it was the means of reconciling the major conflict in his art, the conflict between abstraction and sensibility.
Abstraction is real, probably more real than nature.
Abstraction is itself an abstract word and has no single meaning. . . Every word in our language is abstract, because it represents something else.
Oh abstractions are just abstract until they have an ache in them.
My message to the serious programmer is this: spend a part of your working day examining and refining your own methods. Even though programmers are always struggling to meet some future or past deadline, methodological abstraction is a wise long term investment.
Wisdom. . . is often an abstraction associated not with fact or reality but with the man who asserts it and the manner of its assertion.
The effective exploitation of his powers of abstraction must be regarded as one of the most vital activities of a competent programmer.
Suddenly absurdism wasn’t an intellectual abstraction, it was actually realism. You could see the way that wealth was begetting wealth, wealth was begetting comfort — and that the cumulative effect of an absence of wealth was the erosion of grace.
I felt like my parents were always involved with abstraction, and I wanted to do something very specific.
Sometimes I start in a very realistic fashion, and as I go on from one painting to another of the same kind, it becomes simplified until it can be nothing but abstraction.
Part of knowing who we are is knowing we are not someone else. And Jew is only the name we give to that stranger, the agony we cannot feel, the death we look at like a cold abstraction. Each man has his Jew; it is the other.
