A Quote by Julian Jaynes

Abstract words are ancient coins whose concrete images in the give and take of talk have worn away with use.

Julian Jaynes

Quote Topics

Abstract Ancient Away Coins Concrete Give Give And Take Images Take Talk Use Whose Words Worn

Quote Author

Julian Jaynes
American - Psychologist
February 27, 1920 - November 21, 1997

The most important lesson to take away from allowing the minimum wage and unemployment benefit data to talk is that abstract notions of what is right, good and just should be examined from a concrete, operational point of view. A dose of reality is most edifying.

Steve Hanke

Compared with men, it is probable that brutes neither attend to abstract characters, nor have associations by similarity. Their thoughts probably pass from one concrete object to its habitual concrete successor far more uniformly than is the case with us. In other words, their associations of ideas are almost exclusively by contiguity. So far, however, as any brute might think by abstract characters instead of by association of con cretes, he would have to be admitted to be a reasoner in the true human sense. How far this may take place is quite uncertain.

William James

To me, a story can be both concrete and abstract, or a concrete story can hold abstractions. And abstractions are things that really can't be said so well with words.

David Lynch

I like using concrete imagery, but I don't feel that's what it's about. It's a combination of concrete and abstract to take the listener somewhere they know better than you. That's true for music, seeing a painting, watching a movie... it's all some kind of an escape.

M. Ward

truths are illusions of which one has forgotten that they are illusions, metaphors that have become worn-out and deprived of their sensuous force, coins that have lost their imprint and are now no longer seen as coins but as metal.

Friedrich Nietzsche

Ancient portraits are symbolic images without any immediate relation to the individuals represented; they are not portraits as we understand them. It is remarkable that philologists who are capable of carrying accuracy to the extremes in the case of words are as credulous as babies when it comes to "images," and yet an image is so full of information that ten thousands words would not add up to it.

George Sarton

We are all hungry and thirsty for concrete images. Abstract art will have been good for one thing: to restore its exact virginity to figurative art.

Salvador Dali

Words are the coins making up the currency of sentences, and there are always too many small coins.

Jules Renard

Many gold and silver experts will recommend you buy numismatic coins - rare and old coins. If you are not a rare coin expert, I'd encourage you to stay away from them. New investors often pay too much for rare coins that are not really rare.

Robert Kiyosaki

Words can enhance experience, but they can also take so much away. We see an insect and at once we abstract certain characteristics and classify it - a fly. And in that very cognitive exercise, part of the wonder is gone. Once we have labeled the things around us we do not bother to look at them so carefully. Words are part of our rational selves, and to abandon them for a while is to give freer reign to our intuitive selves.

Jane Goodall

A man may talk inspiringly to a woman about love in the abstract--but the look in his eyes is always perfectly concrete.

Helen Rowland

Never use abstract nouns when concrete ones will do. If you mean “More people died” don’t say “Mortality rose.

C. S. Lewis

Talk with M. Hermite. He never evokes a concrete image, yet you soon perceive that the more abstract entities are to him like living creatures.

Henri Poincare

Question the images. Take them by the hand and don't let the sweet distancing they offer you vanquish you; do away with the distance's comfort or the soft indifference you derive from concentrating on the quality of the framing, the use of light and shadows, the successful composition. Force these images to bring you to the Mexican Southeast, to history, to the struggle, to this taking sides, to choose a faction.