Many were incarcerated with the aberrant prosaic possibilities of ataxia. Only the mentally sensitive few were cognizant of the nuisance to serenity and an actuality that lacked a balance betwixt havoc and sangfroid. The intellectual capabilities of the excellent idiosyncratic talents of a man with an agog outlook for de minimis fringe entities had left the portal ajar for the enlightened few, to get a glimpse of the obscure reality that most had decided to claim Socratic ignorance to evade inquiries.

— O.Z. Napaeae

Mathematics is much more than a language for dealing with the physical world. It is a source of models and abstractions which will enable us to obtain amazing new insights into the way in which nature operates.

— Melvin Schwartz

Mathematics is the art of giving the same name to different things.

— Henri Poincaré

Monotheism and an absolute God define one another. The absolute is a mental construct, an abstract mental model. The absolute, whether it is the purest abstract essence or an extreme abstract measure, only exists in our minds as an abstraction. Furthermore, the absolute will only lead to the abandon of all measure and blind us to the relative interdependence of all things. The measure of knowledge of life is the knowledge of the measure of this relative interdependence.

— Haroutioun Bochnakian

Music is the most abstract of the arts; dance, the most concrete.

— Marty Rubin

Our intelligence cannot wall itself up alive, like a pupa in a chrysalis. It must at any cost keep on speaking terms with the universe that engendered it.

— William James

Remember that every science is based upon an abstraction. An abstraction is taking a point of view or looking at things under a certain aspect or from a particular angle. All sciences are differentiated by their abstraction.

— Fulton J. Sheen

Sadism is abstraction, metacolorism, thematic, exotic, convalescent substrate, soft act, collectivism, pluralization, sensationalism, plural art, thematic colorism, reabstraction.

— Lepota L. Cosmo

She really was pretty, for a grown-up, but when you are seven, beauty is an abstraction, not an imperative.

— Neil Gaiman

Similarities are read into nature by our nervous system, and so are structurally less fundamental than differences. Less fundamental, but no less important, as life and 'intelligence' would be totally impossible without abstracting. It becomes clear that the problem which has so excited the s.r. of the people of the United States of America and added so much to the merriment of mankind, 'Is the evolution a ''fact'' or a ''theory''?, is simply silly. Father and son are never identical - that surely is a structural 'fact' - so there is no need to worry about still higher abstractions, like 'man' and 'monkey'. That the fanatical and ignorant attack on the theory of evolution should have occurred may be pathetic, but need concern us little, as such ignorant attacks are always liable to occur. But that biologists should offer 'defenses' based on the confusions of orders of abstractions, and that 'philosophers' should have failed to see the simple dependence is rather sad. The problems of 'evolution' are verbal and have nothing to do with life as such, which is made up all through of different individuals, 'similarity' being structurally a manufactured article, produced by the nervous system of the observer.

— Alfred Korzybski