Quotes about Abstraction

What death is, and the fact that, if a man looks at it in itself, and by the abstractive power of reflection resolves into their parts all the things which present themselves to the imagination in it, he will then consider it to be nothing else than an operation of nature;

The science of mathematics treats its object as though it were something abstracted mentally, whereas it is not abstract in reality.

The highest, i.e., the most general concepts, are the poorest; ultimately these are just empty shells, as, e.g., being, essence, thing, becoming, ect. - incidentally, whatever could philosophical systems produce when they are merely spun out of these same concepts and have as their matter only such empty shells of thought? They must be infinitely empty and poor, and therefore, turn out to be tedious and suffocating.

it is worthy of consideration, indeed marvelous, how besides his life in concreto, a person always leads a second in abstracto as well.

String theory is rather like plumbing, in a way.

The attempt to understand reality apart from that action of God in and upon reality means living in anabstraction; it means failing to live in reality and vacillating between the extremes of a servile attitude toward the status quo and a protest in principle against it. Only God's becoming human makes possible an action that is genuinely in accord with reality. The world remains world. But it only does so because God has taken care of it and declared it to be under God's rule.

All thinking about human beings without Christ is unfruitful abstraction. The counterimage to the human being taken up into the form of Christ is the human being as self-creator, self-judge, and self-renewer; these people bypass their true humanity and therefore, sooner or later, destroy themselves.

Without God, all seeing and perceiving of things and laws become abstraction, a separation from both origin and goal.

The creative principle [of science] resides in mathematics.

A whole population of strangers inhabited and shaped that little body, lived in that mind and controlled its wishes, dictated its thoughts...The name was an abstraction, a title arbitrarily given, like France or England, to a collection, never long the same, of many individuals who were born, lived, and died within him, as the inhabitants of a country appear and disappear, but keep alive in their passage the identity of the nation to which they belong.

Omission and simplification help us to understand--but help us, in many cases, to understand the wrong thing; for our comprehension may be only of the abbreviator's neatly formulated notions, not of the vast, ramifying reality from which these notions have been so arbitrarily abstracted.

It is in man that God must be loved, because the love of God goes through the love of man. Whoever loves God exclusively, namely excluding man, reduces his love and his God to the level of abstraction. Beshtian Hasidism denies all abstraction.