I truly believe that to stay home, to learn the names of things, to realize who we live among. . . then I believe a politics of place emerges where we are deeply accountable to our communities, to our neighborhoods, to our home. . . If we are not rooted deeply in place, making that commitment to dig in and stay put. . . then I think we are living a life without specificity, and then our lives become abstractions. Then we enter a place of true desolation.
There are absences, but there are also presences. It's about how painting can evolve its own abstractions. I didn't know the painting was going to be about that, but it has to have that journey; I have to learn something, I have to end up somewhere I didn't expect to be, otherwise, I don't think it's painting.
We must be careful not to confuse data with the abstractions we use to analyse them.
It is easier to compare concrete things in a fictional story with concrete things in real life than it is to compare abstractions with concrete things in real life (though both are honorable and necessary things to do).
Isolated material particles are abstractions, their properties being definable and observable only through their interaction with other systems.
It is interesting to observe how real the object remains, in spite of all abstractions.
Gnosis is lived upon facts, withers away in abstractions, and is difficult to find even in the noblest of thoughts.
I think we are living a life without specificity, and then our lives become abstractions.
Psychologically, the teaching of abstractions first is wrong. Indeed, a thorough understanding of the concrete must precede the abstract.
For the Warrior of the Light, there are no abstractions.
Even at its most perceptive, sociology deals in abstractions.
Accordingly, France Had Voltaire, and his school of negative thinkers, and England (or rather Scotland) had the profoundest negative thinker on record, David Hume: a man, the peculiarities of whose mind qualified him to detect failure of proof, and want of logical consistency, at a depth which French skeptics, with their comparatively feeble powers of analysis and abstractions stop far short of, and which German subtlety alone could thoroughly appreciate, or hope to rival.
All non-trivial abstractions, to some degree, are leaky.
I don't see those paintings as abstractions, especially because they are emblems of the inkblot. They aren't smashed together; they are constructed shape-by-shape, layer-by-layer, like any other picture.
Oh abstractions are just abstract until they have an ache in them.
You used the word "civilization", which means a set of abstractions, symbols, conventions. Experience tends to be vicarious; emotions are predigested and electrical; ideas become more real than things.
Where jargon turns living issues into abstractions, and where jargon ends by competing with jargon, people don't have causes. They only have enemies.
Life is filled with abstractions, and the only way to make heads or tails of it is going through intuition.
To make abstractions hold in reality is to destroy reality.
Greek is a musical and prolific language, that gives a soul to the objects of sense, and a body to the abstractions of philosophy.
