The text loses its virginity simply by being staged: it's no longer the abstract ideal version; it's an event.-Tom Stoppard

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"There is no abstract art. You must always start with something. Afterward you can remove all traces of reality." Pablo Picasso

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My experience is that money and transactions purify relations; ideas and abstract matters like recognition and credit warp them, creating an atmosphere of perpetual rivalry. Nassim Nicholas Taleb

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Maybe it was the alcohol, maybe it was the truth, maybe I didn't want things to turn abstract, but I felt I should say it, because this was the moment to say it, because it suddenly dawned on me that this was why I had come, to tell him 'You are the only person I'd like to say goodbye to when I die, because only then will this thing I call my life make any sense.

And if I should hear that you died, my life as I know it, the me who is speaking with you now, will cease to exist.

Call Me by Your Name, André Aciman

Man cannot survive except through his mind.

He comes on earth unarmed.

His brain is his only weapon.

Animals obtain food by force.

man had no claws, no fangs, no horns, no great strength of muscle.

He must plant his food or hunt it.

To plant, he needs a process of thought.

To hunt, he needs weapons,and to make weapons - a process of thought.

From this simplest necessity to the highest religious abstraction, from the wheel to the skyscraper, everything we are and we have comes from a single attribute of man -the function of his reasoning mind.

The Fountainhead, Ayn Rand