personal development on Abstraction

The ways Jesus goes about loving and saving the world are personal: nothing disembodied, nothing abstract, nothing impersonal. Incarnate, flesh and blood, relational, particular and local. The ways em...

There is plenty of courage among us for the abstract, but not for the concrete.

The politician Helen Violet Asquith (later Bonham Carter) was once attending a dinner with Winston Churchill, who initially seemed lost in abstraction for an awkwardly long period of time. Abruptly he...

Imagination “completes the picture” by transcending the actual memories and provable facts.

A work of art is never finished, only abandoned.

Presence is experienced as a unitary whole. Think, for example, about the experience of sitting on the top of a hill, far from the polluting lights of a city, gazing at a dark, starry sky. Unless you ...

But works of imagination come of an impulse to transcend the limits of experience or provable knowledge in order to make a thing that is whole. No human work can become whole by including everything, ...

When we are regularly shamed away from thoughts that venture near spirituality and transcendence, we learn to avoid it altogether, even in our thoughts. We develop a resistance to thoughts that would ...

Imagination disposes of everything; it creates beauty, justice, and happiness, which are everything in this world.

We have now sunk to a depth at which restatement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent men.

Fiction does not ask us to believe things,” he points out, “but to imagine them.” “Imagining the heat of the sun on your back is about as different an activity as can be from believing that it will be...

I am enough of an artist to draw freely upon my imagination. Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world.

A great deal of intelligence can be invested in ignorance when the need for illusion is deep.”

People will do anything, no matter how absurd, to avoid facing their own souls.

Tolerating absence is, in essence, trusting presence—even when the one who is present to us is not physically present. Think of the two-year-old gradually loosening his clinging grasp to the leg of hi...

Contemplation is not and cannot be a function of this external self. There is an irreducible opposition between the deep transcendent self that awakens only in contemplation, and the superficial, exte...

Once you can accept the universe as being something expanding into an infinite nothing which is something, wearing stripes with plaid is easy.

From drugs and alcohol to TV and workaholism, we are increasingly a society that fulfills T.S. Eliot’s description of a people “distracted by distraction.” There is hardly a public menace we can name ...

[T]here is no goodness that is not bodily and realistic and local.

A remarkable aspect of your mental life is that you are rarely stumped.

Too often we give real estate to things in our lives that either haven’t earned their land or were never meant to occupy important space in the first place.

“It is funny how mortals always picture us as putting things into their minds: in reality our best work is done by keeping things out.”

But it’s not so simple, that sort of “quiet hour”. It has to be learned. A lot of unimportant inner litter and bits and pieces have to be swept out first. Even a small head can be piled high inside wi...

I am not absentminded. It is the presence of mind that makes me unaware of everything else.

[The decay of Logic results from an] untroubled assumption that the particular is real and the universal is not.

Attention is an intentional, unapologetic discriminator. It asks what is relevant right now, and gears us up to notice only that.

"Nothing discernible to the eye of the spirit is more brilliant or obscure than man; nothing is more formidable, complex, mysterious, and infinite. There is a prospect greater than the sea, and i...

In this short excerpt, pastor and author Austin Fischer summarizes the late 19th century book Flatland as an analogy for the often-one-dimensional faith that exists our time: tIn 1884, an English sc...

To observe without evaluating is the highest form of intelligence.

The soul without imagination is what an observatory would be without a telescope.