Nobody really thinks who does not abstract from that which is given, who does not relate the facts to the factors which have made them, who does not — in his mind — undo the facts. Abstractness is the very life of thought, the token of its authenticity.

A separate individual is an abstraction unknown to experience, and so likewise is society when regarded as something apart from individuals.

You can’t respect other people’s individuality if you focus on your own individuality in a kind of abstract, isolated way. The point is that you are an individual inasmuch as you exist in a social matrix of others who respect your individuality and your right to make choices. That’s concrete individuality: an individuality that recognizes that it owes its existence to a kind of communal respect on the part of all the other individualities, and that it had better therefore respect them similarly.

The more freely abstract the form becomes, the purer, and also the more primitive it sounds. Therefore, in a composition in which corporeal elements are more or less superfluous, they can be more or less omitted and replaced by purely abstract forms, or by corporeal forms that have been completely abstracted.. .Here we are confronted by the question: Must we not then renounce the object altogether, throw it to the winds and instead lay bare the purely abstract? This is a question that naturally arises, the answer to which is at once indicated by an analysis of the concordance of the two elements of form (the objective and the abstract). Just as every word spoken (tree, sky, man) awakens an inner vibration, so too does every pictorially represented object. To deprive oneself of the possibility of this calling up vibrations would be to narrow one's arsenal of expressive means. At least, that is how it is today. But apart from today's answer, the above question receives the eternal answer to every question in art that begins with 'must.' There is no 'must' in art, which is forever free.

How many people make themselves abstract to appear profound. The most useful part of abstract terms are the shadows they create to hide a vacuum.

an intellectual concept abstracts from everything sensuous, it is not abstracted from sensuous things, and perhaps would be more correctly called abstracting than abstract. Intellectual concepts it is more cautious, therefore, to call pure ideas, and concepts given only empirically, abstract ideas.

There are idiots who define my work as abstract; yet what they call abstract is what is most realistic. What is real is not the appearance, but the idea, the essence of things.

For the ego exists in an abstract sense alone, being an abstraction from memory, somewhat like the illusory circle of fire made by a whirling torch. We can, for example, imagine the path of a bird through the sky as a distinct line which it has taken. But this line is as abstract as a line of latitude. In concrete reality, the bird left no line, and, similarly, the past from which our ego is abstracted has entirely disappeared. Thus any attempt to cling to the ego or to make it an effective source of action is doomed to frustration.

How does the old joke go? I like people in the abstract but not in the concrete?

I like people in the abstract but not in the concrete?

An individual is a four-dimensional objectof greatly elongated form; in ordinary language we say he has considerable extension in time and insignificant extension in space.

It may be said very abstractly that in personality all persons are equal. But this is an empty tautological proposition, in logic identified with the law of mere identity or A = A. This is so because a person abstractly considered is not as yet separate from others, and has no distinguishing attribute.
Equality is the abstract identity set up by the mere understanding. Upon this principle, mere impoverished reflecting thought, or, in other words, spirit in its middle ranges, is apt to fall, when before it there arises the relation of identity to difference. This equalit would be only the identity of abstract persons as such, and would exclude all reference to posession, which is the basis of inequality. Sometimes the demand is made for equality in the division of the soil of the earth, and even other kinds of wealth. The theory of a pious, friendly brotherhood of men who are to possess all goods in common, and to banish the principle of private ownership, easily presents itself to one who fails to understand the nature of freedom of spirit and nature of right, through mistaking their definite phases. Claims of a demand for equality in divisions of wealth are superficial, because the differences of wealth are due not only to the accidents of external nature but also to the infinite variety and difference of mental ability and character.

A number of abstract ideas, of which we are as a matter of fact unconscious. We do not see them, but we see other things through them.

We define (and so come to feel) the individual in the light of our narrowed "spotlight" consciousness which largely ignores the field or environment in which he is found. "Individual" is the Latin form of the Greek "atom"—that which cannot be cut or divided any further into separate parts. We cannot chop off a person's head or remove his heart without killing him. But we can kill him just as effectively by separating him from his proper environment. This implies that the only true atom is the universe—that total system of interdependent "thing-events" which can be separated from each other only in name. For the human individual is not built as a car is built. He does not come into being by assembling parts, by screwing a head on to a neck, by wiring a brain to a set of lungs, or by welding veins to a heart. Head, neck, heart, lungs, brain, veins, muscles, and glands are separate names but not separate events, and these events grow into being simultaneously and interdependently. In precisely the same way, the individual is separate from his universal environment only in name. When this is not recognized, you have been fooled by your name. Confusing names with nature, you come to believe that having a separate name makes you a separate being. This is—rather literally—to be spellbound.