#images

If the portraits of our absent friends are pleasant to us, which renew our memory of them and relieve our regret for their absence by a false and empty consolation, how much more pleasant are letters which bring us the written characters of the absent friend. ↗

— Héloïse d'Argenteuil

#company #consolation #friends #friendship #images

There's no reality except the one contained within us. That's why so many people live an unreal life. They take images outside them for reality and never allow the world within them to assert itself. ↗

— Hermann Hesse

#assert #contained #except #images #itself

Men who read it [beauty pornography] don't do so because they want women who look like that. The attraction of what they are holding is that it is not a woman, but a two-dimensional woman-shaped blank. The appeal of the material is not the fantasy that the model will come to life; it is precisely that she will not, ever. Her coming to life would ruin the vision. It is not about life. Ideal beauty is ideal because it does not exist; The action lies in the gap between desire and gratification. Women are not perfect beauties without distance. That space, in a consumer culture, is a lucrative one. The beauty myth moves for men as a mirage, its power lies in its ever-receding nature. When the gap is closed, the lover embraces only his own disillusion. ↗

— Naomi Wolf

#beauty #body-image #consumer #cosmetic-surgery #cosmetics

Sadly, the signals that allow men and women to find the partners who most please them are scrambled by the sexual insecurity initiated by beauty thinking. A woman who is self-conscious can't relax to let her sensuality come into play. If she is hungry she will be tense. If she is "done up" she will be on the alert for her reflection in his eyes. If she is ashamed of her body, its movement will be stilled. If she does not feel entitled to claim attention, she will not demand that airspace to shine in. If his field of vision has been boxed in by "beauty"--a box continually shrinking--he simply will not see her, his real love, standing right before him. ↗

— Naomi Wolf

#beauty #body-image #cosmetic-surgery #cosmetics #culture

Both expectations and memories are more than mere images founded on previous experience. ↗

— Samuel Alexander

#expectations #experience #founded #images #memories

Hence, in desiring, the more the enjoyment is delayed, the more fancy begins to weave about the object images of future fruition, and to clothe the desired object with properties calculated to inflame the impulse. ↗

— Samuel Alexander

#begins #calculated #delayed #desired #desiring

We just kind saw the images and knew the cliches, so to have the opportunity to go there and learn something about Russian music and about Russian people and to see things apart from being a tourist. ↗

— Marc Almond

#apart #being #cliches #go #images

These people live again in print as intensely as when their images were captured on old dry plates of sixty years ago... I am walking in their alleys, standing in their rooms and sheds and workshops, looking in and out of their windows. Any they in turn seem to be aware of me. ↗

— Ansel Adams

#ago #am #any #aware #captured

My job is to make images and leave the decision-making and conclusion-drawing to other people. ↗

— Laurie Anderson

#images #job #leave #make #other

The symbolic view of things is a consequence of long absorption in images. Is sign language the real language of Paradise? ↗

— Hugo Ball

#images #language #long #paradise #real