#images

Compassion is an unstable emotion. It needs to be translated into action, or it withers. The question of what to do with the feelings that have been aroused, the knowledge that has been communicated. If one feels that there is nothing 'we' can do -- but who is that 'we'? -- and nothing 'they' can do either -- and who are 'they' -- then one starts to get bored, cynical, apathetic. ↗

— Susan Sontag

#apathy #compassion #images #communication

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

By his very profession, a serious fiction writer is a vendor of the sensuous particulars of life, a perceiver and handler of things. His most valuable tools are his sense and his memory; what happens in his mind is primarily pictures. ↗

— Wallace Stegner

#images #imagination #senses #writing #imagination

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

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

My mind withdrew its thoughts from experience, extracting itself from the contradictory throng of sensuous images, that it might find out what that light was wherein it was bathed... And thus, with the flash of one hurried glance, it attained to the vision of That Which Is. ↗

— Saint Augustine

#bathed #contradictory #experience #extracting #find

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

It was just like a digital fixation with cards and math and science and then I started to look at images of great magicians from Houdini down the line. ↗

— David Blaine

#digital #down #great #houdini #i

Film provides an opportunity to marry the power of ideas with the power of images. ↗

— Steven Bochco

#ideas #images #marry #opportunity #power