Definition of Abstraction

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Abstraction

The act of abstracting, separating, or withdrawing, or the state of being withdrawn; withdrawal.

The act process of leaving out of consideration one or more properties of a complex object so as to attend to others; analysis. Thus, when the mind considers the form of a tree by itself, or the color of the leaves as separate from their size or figure, the act is called abstraction. So, also, when it considers whiteness, softness, virtue, existence, as separate from any particular objects.

An idea or notion of an abstract, or theoretical nature; as, to fight for mere abstractions.

A separation from worldly objects; a recluse life; as, a hermit's abstraction.

Absence or absorption of mind; inattention to present objects.

The taking surreptitiously for one's own use part of the property of another; purloining.

A separation of volatile parts by the act of distillation.

Related Definitions:

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Abstraction Quotations

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

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

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

Washington isn't a city, it's an abstraction.
Dylan Thomas

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

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

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

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

Women's rights is not only an abstraction, a cause; it is also a personal affair. It is not only about us; it is also about me and you. Just the two of us.
Toni Morrison

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

Abstraction Translations

abstraction in Danish is tyveri
abstraction in Dutch is abstract begrip, abstractie
abstraction in French is inattention, abstraction
abstraction in German is Abstraktion {f], Abziehung {f}, Zerstreutheit
abstraction in Portuguese is furto
abstraction in Swedish is abstraktion

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