Abstraction is a mental process we use when trying to discern what is essential or relevant to a problem; it does not require a belief in abstract entities.
Tom G. Palmer

Abstraction is everybody's zero but nobody's nought.
Robert Smithson

Abstraction is real, probably more real than nature.
Josef Albers

An administrator in a bureaucratic world is a man who can feel big by merging his non-entity in an abstraction. A real person in touch with real things inspires terror in him.
Marshall McLuhan

By object is meant some element in the complex whole that is defined in abstraction from the whole of which it is a distinction.
John Dewey

Dancing is the loftiest, the most moving, the most beautiful of the arts, because it is no mere translation or abstraction from life; it is life itself.
Henry Ellis

Everything will be all right - you know when? When people, just people, stop thinking of the United Nations as a weird Picasso abstraction and see it as a drawing they made themselves.
Dag Hammarskjold

From the smallest necessity to the highest religious abstraction, from the wheel to the skyscraper, everything we are and everything we have comes from one attribute of man - the function of his reasoning mind.
Ayn Rand

I have this certain vision of the way I want my comics to look; this sort of photographic realism, but with a certain abstraction that comics can give. It's kind of a fine line.
Daniel Clowes

It is terrible to destroy a person's picture of himself in the interests of truth or some other abstraction.
Doris Lessing

Men do not fight for flag or country, for the Marine Corps or glory or any other abstraction. They fight for one another. And if you came through this ordeal, you would age with dignity.
William Manchester

On the one hand, there are individual actions such as throwing, pushing, touching, rubbing. It is these individual actions that give rise most of the time to abstraction from objects.
Jean Piaget

Pure drawing is an abstraction. Drawing and colour are not distinct, everything in nature is coloured.
Paul Cezanne

Red Carpet has a nice package abstraction layer that allows us to support RPMs and DEBs transparently.
Nat Friedman

Reflective abstraction, however, is based not on individual actions but on coordinated actions.
Jean Piaget

The dynamic element in my philosophy, taken as a whole, can be seen as an obstinate and untiring battle against the spirit of abstraction.
Gabriel Marcel

The economy is not an abstraction. The economy consists of people, and it will only grow if people feel secure and are reasonably free.
John Bruton

The first type of abstraction from objects I shall refer to as simple abstraction, but the second type I shall call reflective abstraction, using this term in a double sense.
Jean Piaget

The Geometer has the special privilege to carry out, by abstraction, all constructions by means of the intellect. Who, then, would wish to prevent me from freely considering figures hanging on a balance imagined to be at an infinite distance beyond the confines of the world?
Evangelista Torricelli

The main reason why men and women make different aesthetic judgments is the fact that the latter, generally incapable of abstraction, only admire what meets their complete approval.
Franz Grillparzer