Abstract Concepts Quotes

Everything we call real is made of things that cannot be regarded as real.

The Internet is just an abstract place. Sure, I've become part of that in some way, but it's hard for me to wrap my head around a lot of it. I prefer just to kind of stay out of it.

Most Americans do not think of liberty and freedom as a set of texts, or a sequence of controversies or a system of abstractions. They understand these ideas in another way, as inherited values that they have learned early in life and deeply believe.

Mathematics is good for the soul, getting things right enlivens a sense of truth, efforts to understand automatically purify desires.

How can you own numbers? Numbers belong to the world.

We're only really thinking when we can't think out fully what we are really thinking about!

I don't think culture is something you can describe.

The ifs and buts of history...form an insubstantial if intoxicating diet.

The meaning of words has become so blurred by past usage that 'abstract' is identified with 'vague' and 'unreal,' and 'inwardness' with a sort of traditional beatitude... The conception of the word 'plastic' has also been limited by individual interpretations.

How can it be that mathematics, being after all a product of human thought which is independent of experience, is so admirably appropriate to the objects of reality?

A mathematician is a device for turning coffee into theorems.

No language which lends itself to visualizability can describe quantum jumps.

Algebra is the intellectual instrument which has been created for rendering clear the quantitative aspects of the world.

People are always demanding proof. These are things that are not easily proved.

Do mathematics have a relation to reality or are they only a mathematical symbol?

Anyone who can contemplate quantum mechanics without getting dizzy hasn't understood it.

Philosophers have argued for centuries about how many angels can dance on the head of a pin, but materialists have known all along that it depends on whether they are jitterbugging or dancing cheek to cheek.

There are metaphysical problems, problems of human existence, that philosophy has never known how to grasp in all their concreteness and that only the novel can seize.

I have a 2-year-old son, and I know I'm dealing with a big, grand word when I can't point to the thing when I define it. Right? If he wants to know what a chair is, I can point to the chair. If he wants to know what religion is, I can't point to anything in particular. The same is true of the state.

Infinity is almost impossible for an eight-year-old to grasp. It's an inquiring age, and you're beginning to shape your thoughts and questions about life in general at that stage.

Mathematics is not only real, but it is the only reality.

I've always enjoyed mathematics. It is the most precise and concise way of expressing any idea.

Only Numbers. Pure math. You have to accustom yourself to thinking that way.

Love cannot express the idea of music, while music may give an idea of love.

Mathematicians always like a deceptively difficult problem.