Abstractions Quotes

“I care about strangers when they're abstractions, but I feel almost nothing when they're literally in front of me.”
― Chuck Klosterman, I Wear the Black Hat: Grappling With Villains

“If you wish to make good art, then you must believe you already do. Otherwise, you will never be good enough.”
― Luhraw

“For what reason then do the realists show themselves so unfriendly toward philosophy? Because they misunderstand their own calling and with all their might want to remain restricted instead of becoming unrestricted! Why do they hate abstractions? Because they themselves are abstract since they abstract from the perfection of themselves, from the elevation of redeeming truth!”
― Max Stirner, False Principle of Our Education

“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, Bouvard and Pécuchet

“The thought is not the thing that it represents. Try to get that right down to your core, right down to the marrow in your bones and into the blood that flows through your veins: the thought is not the thing. Then embrace that intermediary step of unknowing things, and as you enter the unknown, you'll see it is not a place; it is the living reality of things underneath the idea of the unknown. The point is not to spend the rest of your life saying, "I do not know" to everything; it is to step out of the known and directly perceive. You do this by entering the lived reality of not knowing, which takes you out of the known, out of the idea and into the reality of you, of anything, and of anyone. It's a place where words are useful tools, but you are no longer trapped by them.”
― Adyashanti, The Most Important Thing: Discovering Truth at the Heart of Life

“No general knowledge is expressible except in abstract terms. There is nothing particularly difficult about abstractions. We use them every day of our lives and in every sort of conversation. However, the words "abstract" and "concrete" seem to trouble many persons. [How to Read a Book (1972), P. 283]”
― Mortimer J. Adler and Charles Van Doren

“Abstractions are themselves the creatures of the mind; and if the mind itself were an abstraction, we should have no abstractions at all.”
― Ronald Knox, Caliban in Grub Street 1930 [Leather Bound]

“Now that I have looked I hear the wind. I close my eyes and it mingles with mv breath. Words and images run riot in my head, pursuing, flying, clashing, merging, endlessly. But beyond this tumult there is a great calm, and a great indifference, never really to be troubled by anything again.”
― Samuel Beckett, Malone Dies

“... το να αποδίδεις ισχύ σε αφαιρέσεις μέσα στην πραγματικότητα σημαίνει να καταστρέφεις την πραγματικότητα.”
― Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Lectures on the philosophy of history, by G. W. F. Hegel. Tr. from the 3d German ed. by J. Sibree. 1884 [Leather Bound]