An image or picture is an artifact that depicts or records visual perception, for example a two-dimensional picture, that has a similar appearance to some subject – usually a physical object or a person, thus providing a depiction of it.

CONTENT : A - F , G - L , M - R , S - Z , See also , External links

Quotes

Quotes are arranged alphabetically by author

A - F

Similar to body and voice – and different from writing – the picture involves a representation which produces an impression of presence. This presence occupies an absence that is filled with a picture. In the iconic presence, absence is marked. Without denying the absence of what they represent, pictures offer absence as presence. The mask is just such a picture. It creates iconic presence by placing another face on the body. In the case of a dead person it restores the missing face. In the case of an actor, the face itself turns into a mask, and thus conveys a picture. ~ Hans Belting
Akin to the monuments of fallen despots in more recent times, religious pictures fell victim to iconoclasms directed against false or misused images (i.e. idols). In Judaism and Islam, the ban on images pertained only to their religious use and was directed against the visual practices of other populations; in Judaism against an older pictorial tradition (Uehlinger 2003) and in Islam against the use of images in Christian churches (Fowden 2014).
In the context of Christianity the use of images was central to the project of becoming a world religion and of eschewing its Jewish legacy. ~ Hans Belting
  • Narrated 'Aisha: I used to play with the dolls in the presence of the Prophet, and my girl friends also used to play with me. When Allah's Apostle used to enter (my dwelling place) they used to hide themselves, but the Prophet would call them to join and play with me. (The playing with the dolls and similar images is forbidden, but it was allowed for 'Aisha at that time, as she was a little girl, not yet reached the age of puberty.) (Fateh-al-Bari page 143, Vol.13)
  • Iconic presence is presence in and as a picture. The physical presence of a picture in our world refers to the symbolic presence which it depicts. Similar to body and voice – and different from writing – the picture involves a representation which produces an impression of presence. This presence occupies an absence that is filled with a picture. In the iconic presence, absence is marked. Without denying the absence of what they represent, pictures offer absence as presence. The mask is just such a picture. It creates iconic presence by placing another face on the body. In the case of a dead person it restores the missing face. In the case of an actor, the face itself turns into a mask, and thus conveys a picture. If “iconic difference”(Boehm 1994, 29ff.) is a hermeneutic concern, iconic presence is an anthropological issue.
    In the context of religion, pictures represent deities who have no direct presence in the physical world; these deities are not held to be absent (let alone non-existent), but in need of a picture in order to become visible. In primal religions, living bodies transform into apparitions through dance and voice. In the Christian tradition, visual artefacts behaved as living bodies that wept, worked miracles, and were carried through “their” town, as if they could walk by themselves
  • Akin to the monuments of fallen despots in more recent times, religious pictures fell victim to iconoclasms directed against false or misused images (i.e. idols). In Judaism and Islam, the ban on images pertained only to their religious use and was directed against the visual practices of other populations; in Judaism against an older pictorial tradition (Uehlinger 2003) and in Islam against the use of images in Christian churches (Fowden 2014).
    In the context of Christianity the use of images was central to the project of becoming a world religion and of eschewing its Jewish legacy. The “true” portrait of Christ, a late phenomenon after the Council of Chalcedon (451), possessed a special evidence that was appropriated by competing theological schools in divergent ways. Pictures were then upgraded as originals. Iconic presence began to compete with the word in textual revelation. Already the notion of the Mother of God (Theotokos) at the Council of Ephesus (431) enhanced the doctrine of the two natures of Christ in one human face. Islamic theology returned to the verbal revelation of God. The Qur’an has been introduced as a book which God has sent to his prophet. With the Islamic rejection of Jesus as the son of God, the visibility of God became taboo once more.
    Aniconism is a picture theory under reverse conditions and usually reflects a negative experience with pictures. In the Reformation, text and picture competed with one other as different religious media, in a turn again Catholic visual politics. The Counter-Reformation above all used the weapons of a re-catholicized visual politics that transformed the space of the church into a theatre of heaven. The church directed this strategy against the private reading of the bible propagated by the Reformation. In modern secular society, religious pictures lost their old credibility, which also damaged their status as works of art. So even within the same religious tradition pictures were subject to historical change.
  • I believe that robotic thinking helps precision of psychological thought, and will continue to help it until psychophysiology is so far advanced that an image is nothing other than a neural event, and object constancy is obviously just something that happens in the brain.
    • Edwin Boring (1946). Mind and Mechanism; Cited in: Melford E. Spiro (1992) Anthropological Other Or Burmese Brother?: Studies in Cultural Analysis. p. 68.
  • A picture is a poem without words.
    • Cornificius, Anet. ad Her., 4. 28. In Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations (1922), p. 576-77.
  • While the film Life of Christ was rolling past before my eyes I was mentally visualizing the gods, Shri Krishna, Shri Ramachandra their Gokul and Ayodhya.. I was gripped by a strange spell. I bought another ticket and saw the film again. This time I felt my imagination taking shape in the screen. Could this really happen? Could we the sons of India, ever be able to see Indian images on the screen. The whole night passed in this mental agony.
  • Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image (Hebrew פסל) or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth.
    • Exodus 20:4

G - L

Images are books for the illiterate and silent heralds of the honor of the saints, teaching those who see with a soundless voice and sanctifying the sight. ~ John of Damascus
How can you save lay persons when you ascribe to images the power which God gave to his word alone? ~ Andreas Karlstadt
Crucifixion of Jesus of Nazareth - David Lauber: When the crucified Jesus is called the 'image of the invisible God', the meaning is that this is God, and God is like this.
  • Then God said, 'Let us make man in our image, in our likeness, and let them rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air, over the livestock, … So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them.
    • Genesis (1:26-27), in Anne Graham Lotz God's Story, Thomas Nelson Inc, 02-Sep-1997, p. 19.
  • Whoso sheddeth man's blood, by man shall his blood be shed: for in the image of God made he man.
  • It's funny how your relationship with your own looks changes when you go weeks without seeing yourself. None of us really knows what we look like after all. In that nanosecond it takes for a mirror to give our faces back to us our mind has already done all sorts of perverse rearranging.
  • One picture in ten thousand, perhaps, ought to live in the applause of mankind, from generation to generation until the colors fade and blacken out of sight or the canvas rot entirely away.
    • Nathaniel Hawthorne, Marble Faun, Book II, Chapter XII. In Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations (1922), p. 576-77.
  • Memory offers up its gifts only when jogged by something in the present. It isn't a storehouse of fixed images and words, but a dynamic associative network in the brain that is never quiet and is subject to revision each time we retrieve an old picture or old words.
  • Images are books for the illiterate and silent heralds of the honor of the saints, teaching those who see with a soundless voice and sanctifying the sight.
    • John of Damascus "Defense against those who attack the holy images," as translated by Andrew Louth, Three Treatises on the Divine Images, (Saint Vladimir’s Seminary Press: 2003) p. 46
  • An empty canvas is a living wonder -- far lovelier than certain pictures.
  • Who will believe us when we say that we do not love these stuffed dummiescarved or painted imageswhen our deeds convict us? God hates and despises images, as I shall show. He considers them an abomination and says that all human beings are in his eyes as the things they love. Images are an abomination; it follows therefore that we too shall become abominable, if we love them.
  • It cannot therefore be true that images are the textbooks of laypersons. For they are unable to learn their salvation from them. ... How can you save lay persons when you ascribe to images the power which God gave to his word alone?
  • If you were to really hate and dislike a picture with all your heart, so that you could not bear to see or hear of it, how would you like it if someone insisted on getting to know and honor you through such a hated, horrible book? ... And God says that he does not like any image which we make, and ... that he hates and despises all who love images.
  • God desires to indwell in my whole and total heart and cannot in any way tolerate my having an image in my mind's eye.
  • It was a beautiful embodied thought,
    A dream of the fine painter, one of those
    That pass by moonlight o'er the soul, and flit
    'Mid the dim shades of twilight, when the eye
    Grows tearful with its ecstasy.
    • Letitia Elizabeth Landon, The London Literary Gazette (1st June 1822), Poetic Sketches. Second series - Sketch the Fifth - Mr. Martin’s Picture of Clytie
  • The picture that approaches sculpture nearest
    Is the best picture.

M - R

Magic and art tend to share a lot of the same language. They both talk about evocation, invocation, and conjuring. If you’re trying to conjure a character, then maybe you should treat that with the respect that you would if you were trying to conjure a demon. Because if an image of a god is a god, then in some sense the image of a demon is a demon. ~ Alan Moore
Um Habiba and Um Salama mentioned about a church they had seen in Ethiopia in which there were pictures. They told the Prophet about it, on which he said, "If any religious man dies amongst those people they would build a place of worship at his grave and make these pictures in it. They will be the worst creature in the sight of Allah on the Day of Resurrection. ~ Muhammad
  • Magic and art tend to share a lot of the same language. They both talk about evocation, invocation, and conjuring. If you’re trying to conjure a character, then maybe you should treat that with the respect that you would if you were trying to conjure a demon. Because if an image of a god is a god, then in some sense the image of a demon is a demon. I’m thinking of people like Malcolm Lowry, the exquisite author of Under the Volcano. There are kabbalistic demons that are lurking all the way through Under the Volcano, and I assume they were probably similar forces to the ones that eventually overwhelmed Lowry’s life, such as the drinking and the madness. When I hear alcoholics talk about having their demons, I think that they’re probably absolutely literally correct.
  • Um Habiba and Um Salama mentioned about a church they had seen in Ethiopia in which there were pictures. They told the Prophet about it, on which he said, "If any religious man dies amongst those people they would build a place of worship at his grave and make these pictures in it. They will be the worst creature in the sight of Allah on the Day of Resurrection.
    • Muhammad as narrated by Aisha (the wife of the Prophet) Sahih Bukhari 1:8:419
  • My goal was to be different, strong; to sculpt my own body to reinvent the self. It's all about being different and creating a clash with society because of that. I tried to use surgery not to better myself or become a younger version of myself, but to work on the concept of image and surgery the other way around. I was the first artist to do it.
  • I am not sure I can change such a thing, but I can produce images that are different from those we find in comics, video games, magazines and TV shows. There are other ways to think about one's body and one's beauty. If you were to describe me without anyone being able to see me, they would think I am a monster, that I am not fuckable. But if they see me, that could perhaps change.
  • In the old days pictures went forward toward completion by stages. Every day brought something new. A picture used to be a sum of additions. In my case a picture is a sum of destructions. I do a picture — then I destroy it. In the end though, nothing is lost: the red I took away from one place turns up somewhere else.
  • I think a picture is more like the real world when it is made out of the real world.
  • We are frequently faced with the necessity of looking for the picture required for the visualization of an object, not in the perception of this particular object, but in a different perceptual image. ...we can assert the discrepancy between the perceived picture and the objective state. This discrepancy... proves absolutely nothing against the fact that all visualizations are merely sense qualities of the perceptual space. ...If the parallelism is ...to be visualized, we must supplement our assertion by the description of certain qualities with which we are familiar from perceptual space.
  • Claiming to be wise, they became fools, and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images (εἰκόνος) resembling mortal man.
    • Romans 1:22-23

S - Z

The mirror ought to be taken as a guide... you see the picture made upon one plane showing things which appear in relief, and the mirror upon one plane does the same. The picture is on one single surface, and the mirror is the same. ~ Leonardo da Vinci
Thracian peltast, 5th–4th century BC. - Xenophanes: The Ethiops say that their gods are flat-nosed and black,
While the Thracians say that theirs have blue eyes and red hair...
Image and appearance tell you little. The inside is bigger than the outside when you have the eyes to see. ~ William Paul Young
  • Ancient portraits are symbolic images without any immediate relation to the individuals represented; they are not portraits as we understand them. ...It is remarkable that philologists who are capable of carrying accuracy to the extremes in the case of words are as credulous as babies when it comes to "images," and yet an image is so full of information that ten thousands words would not add up to it.
    • George Sarton A History of Science Vol.2 Hellenistic Science and Culture in the Last Three Centuries B.C. (1959). Preface.
  • When you wish to see whether the general effect of your picture corresponds with that of the object represented after nature, take a mirror and set it so that it reflects the actual thing, and then compare the reflection with your picture, and consider carefully whether the subject of the two images is in conformity with both, studying especially the mirror. The mirror ought to be taken as a guide... you see the picture made upon one plane showing things which appear in relief, and the mirror upon one plane does the same. The picture is on one single surface, and the mirror is the same. ...if you but know well how to compose your picture it will also seem a natural thing seen in a great mirror.
  • Imagery played a central role in theories of the mind for centuries. For example, the British Associationists conceptualizes thought itself as sequences of images. And, Wilhelm Wundt, the founder of scientific psychology, emphasized the analysis of images. However, the central role of imagery in theories of mental activity was undermined when Kulpe, in 1904, pointed out that some thoughts are not accompanied by imagery (e.g., one is not aware of the processes that allow one to decide which of two objects is heavier).
    • Robert Andrew Wilson, ‎Frank C. Keil (2001), The MIT Encyclopedia of the Cognitive Sciences. p. 387
  • 2.1 We picture facts to ourselves.
    2.11 A picture presents a situation in logical space, the existence and non-existence of states of affairs.
    2.12 A picture is a model of reality.
    2.13 In a picture objects have the elements of the picture corresponding to them.
    2.131 In a picture the elements of the picture are the representatives of objects.
    2.14 What constitutes a picture is that its elements are related to one another in a determinate way.
    2.141 A picture is a fact.
  • [T]he true vanishing point of every picture is the death image, the Todesbild. The tomb effigy, the memorial portrait, and the death mask approach a condition of perfect substitutability for the irrevocably absent object, the once-living body. The dead person exchanges his body for an image; that image holds a place for him among the living (p. 29 and chap. 6). Belting describes this exchange, enacted in ancient cults of the dead, as the archetype of the image- body-medium triangle (p. 29). The photograph, the performance, and the statue, in turn, point directly toward that ideal exchange-ability. Essentially, every image wants to be a home for a lost soul. "Without the connection to death," Belting explicitly says, "those images that merely simulate the world of life quickly fall into a pointless circularity and the proverbial accusation of deceptiveness...." (p. 190). Death guarantees the image. Without that strong link to the irreversibly absent yet sharply desired object, the image would be a mere work of art.

See also

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