The very same brain centers that interpret and feel physical pain also become activated during experiences of emotional rejection. In brain scans, they light up in response to social ostracism, just as they would when triggered by physically harmful stimuli. When people speak of feeling hurt or of having emotional pain, they are not being abstract or poetic, but scientifically quite precise.

The gift of fantasy has meant more to me than my talent for absorbing positive knowledge.

All our thoughts and concepts are called up by sense-experiences and have a meaning only in reference to these sense-experiences. On the other hand, however, they are products of the spontaneous activity of our minds; they are thus in no wise logical consequences of the contents of these sense-experiences. If, therefore, we wish to grasp the essence of a complex of abstract notions we must for the one part investigate the mutual relationships between the concepts and the assertions made about them; for the other, we must investigate how they are related to the experiences.

Love is like that, fragile and light. No wonder it rests upon our hearts in intangible moments, bids us follow fleeting thoughts and ideas and pursue our abstract imaginings.

When she was fifteen if you’d told her that when she was twenty she’d be going to bed with bald-headed men and liking it, she would have thought you very abstract.

Blue has no dimensions, it is beyond dimensions, whereas the other colours are not….All colours arouse specific associative ideas, psychologically material or tangible, while blue suggests at most the sea and sky, and they, after all, are in actual, visible nature what is most abstract.