abstraction quotes

Some advice: do not paint too much after nature. Art is an abstraction; derive this abstraction from nature while dreaming before it, and think more ofthe creationwhich will result than of nature.

- Paul Gauguin
  Letter to Emile Schuffenecker.

   Part of knowing who we are is knowing we are not someone else. And Jew is only the name we give to that stranger, the agony we cannot feel, the death we look at like a cold abstraction. Each man has his Jew; it is the other.

- Arthur Miller
  Leduc. Incident at Vichy, act1.

Mathematics is thought moving in the sphere of complete abstraction from any particular instance of what it is talking about.

- Alfred North Whitehead
  ScienceAnd the ModernWorld.