an abstraction QUOTES

1 " All art is abstract, because art is an abstraction of the truth. "

2 " Wisdom, itself, is often an abstraction associated not with fact or reality but with the man who asserts it and the manner of its assertion. "

― John Kenneth Galbraith , The Great Crash of 1929

3 " Poetry is an abstraction bloodied. "

― Wallace Stevens

4 " Remember that every science is based upon an abstraction. An abstraction is taking a point of view or looking at things under a certain aspect or from a particular angle. All sciences are differentiated by their abstraction. "

― Fulton J. Sheen , Life is Worth Living

5 " I know now that everything after the accident was merely a tactic to indulge in escapism and self-delusion. When you are hit by a streetcar that almost smashes you to a pulp, when you experience your own end...there is no recovery, only temporary respite, she thought.

Pain made me aware of my body. My body made me aware of deterioration and death. That awareness made me old. My death sentence may have been deferred, but I now had to live with a twofold realization. Not only was I going to die—there was nothing unusual about that except that I was made to realize it at a tender age—but I knew exactly what that meant. Because I had already been through it. Unlike other condemned people for whom death is an abstraction because they have no idea what really awaits them, my stay of death came with a constant reminder, the presence of pain. "

― Slavenka Drakulić , Frida's Bed

6 " [Beware of] the fallacy of misplaced concreteness [mistaking an abstraction for concrete reality, for actuality] In the inescapable flux, there is something that abides; in the overwhelming permanence, there is an element that escapes into flux. Permanence can be snatched only out of flux; and the passing moment can find its adequate intensity only by its submission to permanence.Error is the price we pay for progress.In the real world it is more important that a proposition be interesting than that it be true. The importance of truth is that it adds to interest.Creativity is the universal of universals characterizing ultimate matter of fact. It is that ultimate principle by which the many, which are the universe disjunctively, become the one actual occasion, which is the universe conjunctively. It lies in the nature of things that the many enter into complex unity.The aim of science is to seek the simplest explanations of complex facts. We are apt to fall into the error of thinking that the facts are simple because simplicity is the goal of our quest. The guiding motto in the life of every natural philosopher should be, " Seek simplicity and distrust it." It requires a very unusual mind to undertake the analysis of the obvious.[From various of Whitehead's books, not only PR] "

7 " I looked harder at Matthew 25 and realized that if Jesus said " I was hungry and you fed me," then Christ's presence is not embodied in those who feed the hungry (as important as that work is), but Christ's presence is in the hungry being fed. Christ comes not in the form of those who visit the imprisoned but in the imprisoned being cared for. And to be clear, Christ does not come to us as the poor and hungry. Because, as anyone for whom the poor are not an abstraction but actual flesh-and-blood people knows, the poor and hungry and imprisoned are not a romantic special class of Christlike people. And those who meet their needs are not a romantic special class of Christlike people. We all are equally as sinful and saintly as the other. No, Christ comes to us in the needs of the poor and hungry, needs that are met by another so that the gleaming redemption of God might be known. ... No one gets to play Jesus. But we do get to experience Jesus in that holy place where we meet others' needs and have our own needs met. "

8 " It was partly the war, the revolution did the rest. The war was an artificial break in life-- as if life could be put off for a time-- what nonsense! The revolution broke out willy-nilly like a sigh suppressed too long. Everyone was revived, reborn, changed, transformed. You might say that everyone has been through two revolutions-- his own, personal revolution as well as the general one. It seems to me that socialism is the sea, and all these separate streams, these private, individual revolutions, are flowing into it-- the sea of life, the sea of spontaneity. I said life, but I mean life as you see it in a great picture, transformed by genius, creatively enriched. Only now people have decided to experience it not in books and pictures, but in themselves, not as an abstraction but in practice. "

― Boris Pasternak , Doctor Zhivago

9 " ...But this number, like all the others, must be seen not as 5.7 million, which is an abstraction few of us can grasp, but as 5.7 million times one. This does not mean some generic image of a Jew passing through some abstract notion of death 5.7 million times. It means countless individuals who nevertheless have to be counted, in the middle of life... "

― Timothy Snyder , Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin

10 " Man’s collective mastery of nature— even if we could ignore the mounting evidence that this too is largely an illusion— can hardly be expected to confer a sense of confidence and well- being when it coexists with centralizing forces that have deprived individuals of any mastery over the concrete, immediate conditions of their existence. The collective control allegedly conferred by science is an abstraction that has little resonance in everyday life. "

― Christopher Lasch

11 " Have you ever wondered what it feels like to have a love for the lost? This is a term we use as part of our Christian jargon. Many believers search their hearts in condemnation, looking for the arrival of some feeling of benevolence that will propel them into bold evangelism. It will never happen. It is impossible to love “the lost”. You can’t feel deeply for an abstraction or a concept. You would find it impossible to love deeply an unfamiliar individual portrayed in a photograph, let alone a nation or a race or something as vague as “all lost people”.

Don’t wait for a feeling or love in order to share Christ with a stranger. You already love your heavenly Father, and you know that this stranger is created by Him, but separated from Him, so take those first steps in evangelism because you love God. It is not primarily out of compassion for humanity that we share our faith or pray for the lost; it is first of all, love for God. "

― John Piper

12 " But, he thought, what does it mean, insane? A legal definition. What do I mean? I feel it, see it, but what is it?

He thought, It is something they do, something they are. It is their unconsciousness. Their lack of knowledge about others. Their not being aware of what they do to others, the destruction they have caused and are causing. No, he thought. That isn't it. I don't know; I sense it, I intuit it. But -- they are purposelessly cruel... is that it? No, God, he thought. I can't find it, make it clear. Do they ignore parts of reality? Yes. But it is more. It is their plans. Yes, their plans. The conquering of the planets. Something frenzied and demented, as was their conquering of Africa, and before that, Europe and Asia.

Their view; it is cosmic. Not a man here, a child there, but an abstraction : race, land. Volk. Land. Blut. Ehre. Not of honourable men but of Ehre itself, hounor; the abstract is real, the actual is invisible to them. Die Güte, but not good men, this good man. It is their sense of space and time. "

― Philip K. Dick , The Man in the High Castle