"Abstractness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... conjecture that the names Carnival, Death, and Summer are comparatively late and inadequate expressions for the beings personified or embodied in the customs with which we have been dealing. The very abstractness of the names bespeaks a modern origin; for the personification of times and seasons like the Carnival and Summer, or of an abstract notion like death, is not primitive. But the ceremonies themselves bear the stamp of a dateless antiquity; therefore we can hardly help ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... progressive realization of himself, this development, he—so far as he is good— consciously conducts. And finally we found in the person the strange fact that he conceives of his good self as essentially in conjunction with his fellow man, and recognizes that parted off and in separate abstractness he is no person at all. Accordingly personal organization, direction, enlargement, conjunction. Under our analysis two antithetic worlds emerge, a world of nature and of spirit, the former guided by blind forces, the latter self-managed. Unlike spiritual ...
— The Nature of Goodness • George Herbert Palmer
... perspective and colour valuation of individual minds there must have been; and since it is not given to us to reproduce those of the near spectator in a region which we can never enter, we may yet sometimes console ourselves for the too melancholy abstractness and averageness of scientific representations, by painting that distant historic country as distant indeed, but as its far-off hill ranges and shimmering plains really appear in their combination of form and colour, from the height of an individual interest of our own, and beneath ...
— Euphorion - Being Studies of the Antique and the Mediaeval in the - Renaissance - Vol. I • Vernon Lee
... that the source of value is not the accident of Nature, but Nature redeemed, regenerated by spirit, that all values are moral values, led to a certain abstractness of treatment,—on one side qualities to be embodied, on the other figures to receive them, so that the character seems adventitious, detachable, not thoroughly at one with the form. For instance, the fiends in the Orvieto Inferno are not terror embodied, as the Jove of ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 76, February, 1864 • Various |
