Abstract thought quotes:

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Americans have no capacity for abstract thought, and make bad coffee. -- Georges Clemenceau
To those who have exhausted politics, nothing remains but abstract thought. -- Honore de Balzac
You've got a lot of time for abstract thought when you've got your hand stuck up a dead badger. -- Terry Pratchett
You have something that exists in your head, and getting that abstract thought from your head into something that actually exists is a difficult process. -- Lazaro Hernandez
Reality is infinitely diverse, compared with even the subtlest conclusions of abstract thought, and does not allow of clear-cut and sweeping distinctions. Reality resists classification. -- Fyodor Dostoevsky
You need language for thought, and you need language to anticipate death. There is no abstract thought without language and no anticipation. I think the anticipation of death without language would be impossible. -- David Cronenberg
We're not good at noticing slow, steady changes in our environments, our senses are not very acute compared to those of many animals, and we're pretty awful at abstract thought, much less acting on it. -- Dale Jamieson
On an incredibly simplistic level, you can think of depression as occurring when your cortex thinks an abstract thought and manages to convince the rest of the brain that this is as real as a physical stressor. -- Robert M. Sapolsky
For my own part, I abandon the ethics of duty to the Hegelian critique with no regrets; it would appear to me, indeed, to have been correctly characterized by Hegel as an abstract thought, as a thought of understanding. -- Paul Ricoeur
I love the idea of leaving some of the original abstract thought in, because the problem is that when you pick up a pen you become a snob, your own worse critic. You edit yourself in a way that is non-creative. -- Glen Hansard
Critical (i.e., separating) methods apply only to the world-as-nature. It would be easier to break up a theme of Beethoven with dissecting knife or acid than to break up the soul by methods of abstract thought . Nature-knowledge and man-knowledge have neither ways nor aims in common. -- Oswald Spengler
If language naturally evolves to serve the needs of tiny rodents with tiny rodent brains, then what's unique about language isn't the brilliant humans who invented it to communicate high-level abstract thoughts. What's unique about language is that the creatures who develop it are highly vulnerable to being eaten. -- Temple Grandin
As you see, I do not treat the creation of fiction, that to say the invention and development of fantasies, as a form of abstract thought. I don't wish to deny the uses of the intellect, but sometimes one has the intuition that the intellect by itself will lead one nowhere. -- J. M. Coetzee
In civilized places idleness, once the prerequisite for abstract thought, poetry, religion, philosophy, and falling in love, has become a character flaw. In America we've managed to stamp it out almost completely, and few people under forty can remember a single moment of it, even in earliest childhood. The phrase 'spare time' has vanished from the land. -- Barbara Holland
I've always thought abstractly - through theme and variations rather than narrative. -- Robert Wilson
As information technology restructures the work situation, it abstracts thought from action. -- Shoshana Zuboff
My thoughts about God are vague and abstract. My connection with the energy of the universe is shaky. -- Janet Fitch
All individual thought is dissolved in universal thought, as all form is dissolved in the universal plastic means of Abstract-Real painting. -- Piet Mondrian
Screenwriting is always about what people say or do, whereas good writing is about a thought process or an abstract image or an internal monologue, none of which works on screen. -- David Nicholls
What interested me was dance - the way that it was constructed with time-space constructions, and that it was abstract. I always thought: 'Why couldn't theater be that way? Or an opera?' -- Robert Wilson
I guess law was always interesting to me because you deal with constants. I like to deal with constants, abstracts, constants and reason and ration, rational approaches to things. I don't know, I never really thought why I wanted to study law. But if you ask me whether I would do it again, absolutely. -- Mohamed ElBaradei
I had never thought that I would be involved in narrative structures. As a young guy, I was more interested in abstract modeling. But as I got older, I began to see that there was no reason to limit myself to any intellectual or conceptual postulate, when in fact I'm a professional student of music. -- Anthony Braxton
The narrative oftentimes is that everything that comes out of the hood is 'real,' and so I thought, 'I'll base it on the absurd, the not real. I'll twist the idea of real on its head and see if I can get away with it. I'll make paintings that come not from a place but through an abstract gaze.' -- Mark Bradford
Whoever thought the immediate alternates with the immediate action is not an abstract painter. -- Pierre Alechinsky
The mind is inherently embodied. Thought is mostly unconscious. Abstract concepts are largely metaphorical. -- George Lakoff
Lenin thought abstract art was a conspiracy by the bourgeois to demoralize the proletariat. Yeah, socialist realism! -- Carl Andre
The abstract way we think is really grounded in the concrete, bodily world much more than we thought. -- John Bargh
Maybe I was a little jealous or envious of the abstract painters - but the truth was I thought what they were doing was boring. -- Larry Rivers
Most people would have found it grotesque, but when you're in love nothing is so abstract or horrible that it can't be thought of as cute. -- David Sedaris

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