A Quote by Alfred North Whitehead

To be an abstraction does not mean that an entity is nothing. It merely means that its existence is only a factor of a more concrete element of nature.

Alfred North Whitehead

Quote Topics

Abstraction Concrete Does Element Entity Existence Factor Mean Means Merely More Nature Nothing Only

Quote Author

Alfred North Whitehead
English - Mathematician
February 15, 1861 - December 30, 1947

Use no superfluous word, no adjective, which does not reveal something. Don't use such an expression as 'dim land of peace.' It dulls the image. It mixes an abstraction with the concrete. It comes from the writer's not realizing that the natural object is always the adequate symbol. Go in fear of abstraction.

Ezra Pound

To adjoin the instinctual nature does not mean to come undone, change everything from left to right, from black to white, to move the east to west, to act crazy or out of control. It does not mean to lose one's primary socializations, or to become less human. It means quite the opposite. The wild nature has a vast integrity to it

Clarissa Pinkola Estes

Driven by the forces of love, the fragments of the world seek each other so that the world may come into being. ... the universal gravity of bodies, ... is merely the reverse or shadow of that which really moves nature. Love in all its subtleties is nothing more, and nothing less, than the more or less direct trace marked on the heart of the element by the psychical convergence of the universe upon itself.

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

My painting is visible images which conceal nothing... they evoke mystery and indeed when one sees one of my pictures, one asks oneself this simple question 'What does that mean'? It does not mean anything, because mystery means nothing either, it is unknowable.

Rene Magritte

All forms of beauty, like all possible phenomena, contain an element of the eternal and an element of the transitory - of the absolute and of the particular. Absolute and eternal beauty does not exist, or rather it is only an abstraction creamed from the general surface of different beauties. The particular element in each manifestation comes from the emotions: and just as we have our own particular emotions, so we have our own beauty.

Charles Baudelaire

You have to figure out what conversion means in your case. What does retention mean? What does activation mean? For every business, it's going to be slightly different because of the nature of the product and the kinds of people who use it.

Stewart Butterfield

We brick-and-mortar ourselves away from nature. The outside world is behind glass, underneath a slab of concrete, running through PVC. Our steel and concrete are suitable enough until nature comes knocking. And when she wants to get in, nothing can stop her.

Kyle Hill

Freedom, in a political context, means freedom from government coercion. It does not mean freedom from the landlord, from the employer, or freedom from the laws of nature which do not provide men with automatic prosperity. It means freedom from the coercive power of the state ' and nothing else

Ayn Rand

Education does not mean knowledge (gyan) only, it also contains a life within it; it is not an arrangement, it is a duty. It is not merely a means of livelihood; it is the precious treasure of the noble tradition of giving, bestowing.

Narendra Modi

Yes, there was an element of abstraction and unreality in misfortune. But when an abstraction starts to kill you, you have to get to work on it.

Albert Camus

Living entity is food for another living entity, it does not mean that I shall eat my children also. There is discretion.

A. C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada

What it means among other things is the more we learn about the nature of the universe, the nature of creation...if we're not updating what we mean by God...what we mean by the gospel, we're going to have outdated, misleading and actually trivial understandings of those.

Michael Dowd

To an ordinary human being, love means nothing if it does not mean loving some people more than others.

George Orwell

Art does not lie in copying nature.- Nature furnishes the material by means of which is to express a beauty still unexpressed in nature.-The artist beholds in nature more than she herself is conscious of.

Henry James

Only since the turn of the century has abstraction again become recognized as an artistic means of representation. It was then that one returned to the recognition of the immense role abstraction plays in the human mind by its power of concentration upon absolute essentials.