Abstractions Quotes

• Not one idiot in a thousand has been entirely refractory to treatment, not one in a hundred has not been made more happy and healthy; more than thirty per cent have been taught to conform to social and moral law, and rendered capable of order, of good feeling, and of working like the third of a man; more than forty per cent have become capable of the ordinary transactions of life under friendly control, of understanding moral and social abstractions, of working like two-thirds of a man.

  

  Edouard Seguin
  • Healthy
  • Idiot
  • Treatment

• I care about strangers when they're abstractions, but I feel almost nothing when they're literally in front of me.

  

  Chuck Klosterman
  • Strangers
  • Literally
  • Abstractions

• We want spiritual principles to be more than beautiful abstractions; we want them to actually transform our lives.

  

  Marianne Williamson
  • Beautiful
  • Spiritual
  • Principles

• The most intelligent hearers are those who enjoy most heartily the simplest preaching. It is not they who clamor for superlatively intellectual or aesthetic sermons. Daniel Webster used to complain of some of the preaching to which he listened. "In the house of God" he wanted to meditate "upon the simple varieties, and the undoubted facts of religion;" not upon mysteries and abstractions.

  

  Austin Phelps
  • God
  • House
  • Simple

• To see how to make something more general, you need to start with something concrete. In particular, you need to understand the specifics of a particular domain to discover the right abstractions.

  

  Alexander Stepanov
  • Domain
  • Specifics
  • Abstractions

• That's what it is that you rehearse - the making of music, not the playing of notes as abstractions.

  

  Sarah Caldwell
  • Music
  • Rehearse
  • Abstractions

• Perhaps the efforts of the true poets, founders, religions, literatures, all ages, have been, and ever will be, our time and times to come, essentially the same - to bring people back from their present strayings and sickly abstractions, to the costless, average, divine, original concrete.

  

  Walt Whitman
  • Poets
  • Religions
  • Abstractions

• Viewed in abstractions, love is the same thing for everybody. It thrills the same way, and devastates with bloodless efficiency.

  

  Craig Lancaster
  • Love
  • Way
  • Efficiency

• It is interesting to observe how real the object remains, in spite of all abstractions.

  

  Paul Klee
  • Real
  • Interesting
  • Abstractions