Quotes about Abstraction

The God I read about in the Bible is not what God is like—in some timeless abstraction, and that's that—but how God was imagined and then reimagined by ancient people of faith living in real times and places.

A model should be as simple as it can be but no simpler

All suffering is suffering. As C. S. Lewis said, there is no such thing as "the sum of the world's suffering," an abstraction of the philosophers. There are simply individual people who hurt. And who wonder why God permits it.

Yes, there was an element of abstraction and unreality in misfortune. But when an abstraction starts to kill you, you have to get to work on it.

That we live now in an economy that is not sustainable is not the fault only of a few mongers of power and heavy equipment. We all are implicated. We all, in the course of our daily economic life, consent to it, whether or not we approve of it. This is because of the increasing abstraction and unconsciousness of our connection to our economic sources in the land, the land-communities, and the land-use economies.

It never occurs to most of us .. that the question 'what is the truth' is no real question (being irrelative to all conditions) and that the whole notion of the truth is an abstraction from the fact of truths in the plural, a mere useful summarizing phrase like the Latin language or the Law.

Any theory based on experience is necessarily statistical; that is to say, it formulates an ideal average which abolishes all exceptions at either end of the scale and replaces them by an abstract mean.

If chimpanzees have consciousness, if they are capable of abstractions, do they not have what until now has been described as human rights? How smart does a chimpanzee have to be before killing him constitutes murder? What further properties must he show before religious missionaries must consider him worthy of attempts at conversion?

Reason functions by integrating perceptual data into concepts.

The Romanticists did not present a hero as a statistical average, but as an abstraction of man's best and highest potentiality, applicable to and achievable by all men, in various degrees, according to their individual choices.

Abstraction is the condition of the science of metaphysics, but in no way is its content.

For the Angelic Doctor, the reason of conceptual knowledge is just the contrary! It is not his distance from the animal that renders abstraction necessary; it is his distance from God. Abstraction is not a condition of a push from below; it is a result of a fall from above. Abstraction is necessary because our intellect is imperfect. This is the fundamental reason.