Quotes about Abstract

Any time that we move from personal names to abstract labels or graphs or statistics, we are less in touch with reality and diminished in our capacity to deal with what is best and at the center of life. Yet we are encouraged on every side to do just that.

God is love, they once said, but we reversed that, and love, like heaven, was always just around the corner. The more difficult it was to love the particular man beside us, the more we believed in Love, abstract and total. We were waiting, always, for the incarnation. That word, made flesh.

God is not a vague abstract principle or force but a living person who fellowships with His people.

Because the Church is mystery, there can be no question of deductive or crudely empirical tests. Deduction is ruled out because we have no clear abstract concepts of the Church that could furnish terms for a syllogism. Empirical tests are inadequate because visible results and statistics will never by themselves tell us whether a given decision was right or wrong.

Spiritual superiority only sees the individual. But alas, ordinarily we human beings are sensual and, therefore, as soon as it is a gathering, the impression changes- we see something abstract, the crowd, and we become different. But in the eyes of God, the infinite spirit, all the millions that have lived and now live do not make a crowd, He only sees each individual.

Don't leave Christmas in the abstract. Your sin. Your conflict with the Devil. Your victory. He came for this.

If in the representation of perception illusion does at moments distort reality, then in the representation of the abstract error can reign for thousands of years, impose its iron yoke on whole nations, stifle the noblest impulses of mankind; through its slaves and dupes it can enchain even the man it cannot deceive. It is the enemy against which the wisest minds of all times have kept up an unequal struggle, and only what these have won from it has become the property of mankind.

Discipleship means adherence to Christ, and, because Christ is the object of that adherence, it must take the form of discipleship. An abstract Christology, a doctrinal system, a general religious knowledge on the subject of grace or on the forgiveness of sins, render discipleship superfluous, and in fact they positively exclude any idea of discipleship whatever, and are essentially inimical to the whole conception of following Christ.

Ethics as formation, then, is the venture of speaking about the form of Christ taking form in our world neither abstractly nor casuistically, neither programmatically nor purely reflectively.

Theology isn't what drove them to their...theology." author writes on dealing with the embittering experience of those who protect a wounded place with abstract arguments.

That is why we not only learn from literature but enjoy it: it delights as it teaches. And it conveys its kind of truth through the creation of concrete images which incarnate or embody ideas which would otherwise remain abstract and nebulous.

Thought is crude, matter unimaginably subtle.