Mary Magdalene, Seductive Sinner/Repenter

"Every genuine work of art may have a good moral drawn from it, but, of course, in doing so much depends on interpretation and on him who draws the moral. Thus one may hear the most immoral representations defended by saying we must know evil, or sin, in order to act morally; and, conversely, it has been said that the portrayal of Mary Magdalene, the beautiful sinner who afterwards repented, has seduced many into sin, because art makes it looks so beautiful to repent, and you must sin before you can repent."


G.W.F. Hegel [Introductory Lectures on Aesthetics, 1820s]

The Mind's Morning Dew

"In the morning of our days, when the senses are unworn and tender, when the whole man is awake in every part, and the gloss of novelty is fresh upon all the objects that surround us, how lively at that time are our sensations, but how false and inaccurate the judgments we form of things?"


Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, 1759

"In art one does not have to be 'realistic,' for man is at stake, not his occupation or status. Suffering is suffering and joy is joy. The world appears as what it is behind commodity form: a landscape is really a landscape, a man really a man, a thing really a thing."

Herbert Marcuse, "The Affirmative Character of Culture"

An image is like a crystal prism.

“An image is like a crystal prism, it reflects light in the most diverse and unexpected directions illuminating and bringing to consciousness other unexpected images and ideas until, like in meditation, thought itself gets lost in the beauty of the experience."


Manfredi Piccolomini, “Foreward: Omnia Quae Sunt, Sunt Lumina,” On the Composition of Images, Signs & Ideas, by Giordano Bruno [1991].

Beliefs

"To behave as a believer has less to do with the content of the belief we hold than with our commitment to the representations that frame it."


Joseph Leo Koerner, The Reformation of the Image [2004].

Paul Virilio on the Mind/Memories

"When Bergson asserts that mind is a thing that endures, one might add that it is our duration that thinks, feels, sees. The first creation of consciousness would then be its own speed in its time-distance, speed thereby becoming causal idea, idea before the idea. It is thus now common to think of our memories as multidimensional, of thought as transfer, transport (metaphora) in the literal sense."


Paul Virilio, The Vision Machine [1994].