From Richard Nordquist,
Your Guide to Grammar & Composition.
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Definition:

A noun that names an idea, a quality, or a concept.

Examples and Observations:

• "Love is an irresistible desire to be irresistibly desired."
  (Robert Frost)



• "Everything will be all right--you know when? When people, just people, stop thinking of the United Nations as a weird Picasso abstraction and see it as a drawing they made themselves."
  (Dag Hammarskjold)



• "Creativity requires the courage to let go of certainties."
  (Erich Fromm)



• "Men say they love independence in a woman, but they don't waste a second demolishing it brick by brick."
  (Candice Bergen)



• "When love is gone, there's always justice.
  And when justice is gone, there's always force.
  And when force is gone, there's always Mom.
  Hi, Mom!"
  (Laurie Anderson)



• "More than any other time in history, mankind faces a crossroads. One path leads to despair and utter hopelessness. The other, to total extinction. Let us pray we have the wisdom to choose correctly."
  (Woody Allen, "My Speech to the Graduates")



• "Although abstract nouns tend to be uncountable (courage, happiness, news, tennis, training), many are countable (an hour, a joke, a quantity). Others can be both, often with shifts of meaning from general to particular (great kindness/many kindnesses)."
  (Tom McArthur, "Abstract and Concrete," The Oxford Companion to the English Language, 1992)



• "I believe we are on an irreversible trend toward more freedom and democracy--but that could change."
  (Dan Quayle)