Definition of Abstraction

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The act of abstracting, separating, or withdrawing, or the state of being withdrawn; withdrawal.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

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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

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

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

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

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

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

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 is real, probably more real than nature.
Josef Albers

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

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

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.
Havelock Ellis

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

War is an abstraction.
Bruce Jackson

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

Those who tell you that the territorial question is an abstraction, that you can never colonize another territory without the African slavetrade, are both deaf and blind to the history of the last sixty years.
Robert Toombs

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

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

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

Whatever life may really be, it is to us an abstraction: for the word is a generalised term to signify that which is common to all animals and plants, and which is not directly operative in the inorganic world.
Oliver Joseph Lodge

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

Two elements are needed to form a truth - a fact and an abstraction.
Remy de Gourmont

We call those works of art concrete that came into being on the basis of their inherent resources and rules - without external borrowing from natural phenomena, without transforming those phenomena, in other words: not by abstraction.
Max Bill

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

We are so much the victims of abstraction that with the Earth in flames we can barely rouse ourselves to wander across the room and look at the thermostat.
Terence McKenna

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

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

More Abstraction Quotations

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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