73 Quotes About Abstraction

The canvas is the door to another dimension. The paintbrush is the key.

The idea of nothing is itself nothing: the ultimate abstraction.

Both the destruction and the preservation of capitalism are meaningless slogans, but these slogans are supported by real organizations. Corresponding to each empty abstraction there is an actual human group, and any abstraction of which this is not true remains harmless.

And the words people said were just shadows of real things. But some things were too big to be really trapped in words, and even the words were too powerful to be completely tamed by writing.

You have to be taught to recognize and care about differences, you have to be instructed who you really are; you have to learn how generations of dead people and their incomprehensible accomplishments made you the way you are; you have to define your loyalty to an abstraction-based herd that transcends your individuality.

... Lyotard suggests that while discourse operates as a system of representation which defines meanings according to their relation to other concepts in that system, figure is the realm of the singular, of that which refuses to, or simply cannot, be captured and systematized by the concept.

My mind seems to have become a kind of machine for grinding general laws out of large collections of facts, but why this should have caused the atrophy of that part of the brain alone, on which the higher tastes depend, I cannot conceive.

Here lies the total abstraction and the source of all domination: in the breakdown of the dual relation.The strategy of domination is, indeed, to ensure that, through all the techniques of communication, through inescapable, streaming information, there can no longer be any response. It is a domination by signs empty of meaning. But, on the other side, there is an equal indifference and blank resistance.

You see, the notion of "sin" is for me an abstraction. There's no such thing as "sin". There's only such a thing as "tactlessness".