On Images (1960-1969)

"By a symbol I do not mean an allegory or a sign, but an image that describes in the best possible way the dimly discerned nature of the spirit. A symbol does not define or explain; it points beyond itself to a meaning that is darkly divined yet still beyond our grasp, and cannot be adequately expressed in the familiar words of our language." (Carl G Jung, "The Structure And Dynamics Of The Psyche", 1960)

"The ‘self-image’ is the key to human personality and human behavior. Change the self image and you change the personality and the behavior." (Maxwell Maltz, "Psycho-Cybernetics", 1960)

"All our language is composed of brief little dreams; and the wonderful thing is that we sometimes make of them strangely accurate and marvelously reasonable thoughts. […] What should we be without the help of that which does not exist? Very little. And our unoccupied minds would languish if fables, mistaken notions, abstractions, beliefs, and monsters, hypotheses, and the so-called problems of metaphysics did not people with beings and objectless images our natural depths and darkness. Myths are the souls of our actions and our loves. We cannot act without moving towards a phantom. We can love only what we create." (Paul Valéry, "The Outlook for Intelligence", 1962)

"This other world is the so-called physical world image; it is merely an intellectual structure. To a certain extent it is arbitrary. It is a kind of model or idealization created in order to avoid the inaccuracy inherent in every measurement and to facilitate exact definition." (Max Planck, "The Philosophy of Physics", 1963)

"It is not impossible that our own Model will die a violent death, ruthlessly smashed by an unprovoked assault of new facts […]." (Clive S Lewis, The Discarded Image: An Introduction to Medieval and Renaissance Literature", 1964)

"They [archetypes] are, at the same time, both images and emotions. One can speak of an archetype only when these two aspects are simultaneous. When there is merely the image, then there is simply a word picture of little consequence. But by being charged with emotion, the image gains numinosity" (or psychic energy); it becomes dynamic, and consequences of some kind must flow from it." (Carl G Jung,"Man and His Symbols", 1964)

"This language controls by reducing the linguistic forms and symbols of reflection, abstraction, development, contradiction; by substituting images for concepts. It denies or absorbs the transcendent vocabulary; it does not search for but establishes and imposes truth and falsehood." (Herbert Marcuse, "One-Dimensional Man", 1964)

"Thus a word or an image is symbolic when it implies something more than its obvious and immediate meaning. It has a wider ‘unconscious’ aspect that is never precisely defined or fully explained. […] As the mind explores the symbols it is led to ideas that lie beyond the grasp of reason." (Carl G Jung, "Man and His Symbols", 1964)

"This whole illusion has its history in ways of thinking - in the images, models, myths, and language systems which we have used for thousands of years to make sense of the world. […] Idolatry is not the use of images, but confusing them with what they represent, and in this respect mental images and lofty abstractions can be more insidious than bronze idols." (Alan W. Watts," The Book on the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are", 1966)

"Images tell us nothing, either right or wrong, about the external world. […] It is just because forming images is a voluntary activity that it does not instruct us about the external world. […] When we form an image of something we are not observing. The coming and going of the pictures is not something that happens to us. We are not surprised by these pictures, saying ‘Look!’ " (Ludwig Wittgenstein, "Zettel", 1967)

"The great difference between the graphic representation of yesterday, which was poorly dissociated from the figurative image, and the graphics of tomorrow, is the disappearance of the congential fixity of the image. […] When one can superimpose, juxtapose, transpose, and permute graphic images in ways that lead to groupings and classings, the graphic image passes from the dead image, the 'illustration,' to the living image, the widely accessible research instrument it is now becoming. The graphic is no longer only the 'representation' of a final simplification, it is a point of departure for the discovery of these simplifications and the means for their justification. The graphic has become, by its manageability, an instrument for information processing." (Jacques Bertin, Semiology of graphics [Semiologie Graphique], 1967)

"The symbol is the tool which gives man his power, and it is the same tool whether the symbols are images or words, mathematical signs or mesons." (Jacob Bronowski, "The Reach of Imagination", 1967) 

"To analyse graphic representation precisely, it is helpful to distinguish it from musical, verbal and mathematical notations, all of which are perceived in a linear or temporal sequence. The graphic image also differs from figurative representation essentially polysemic, and from the animated image, governed by the laws of cinematographic time. Within the boundaries of graphics fall the fields of networks, diagrams and maps. The domain of graphic imagery ranges from the depiction of atomic structures to the representation of galaxies and extends into the spheres of topography and cartography." (Jacques Bertin, Semiology of graphics [Semiologie Graphique], 1967)

"To imagine means to make images and to move them about inside one's head in new arrangements." (Jacob Bronowski, "The Reach of Imagination", 1967)

"Graphic representation constitutes one of the basic sign-systems conceived by the human mind for the purposes of storing, understanding, and communicating essential information. As a 'language' for the eye, graphics benefits from the ubiquitous properties of visual perception. As a monosemic system, it forms the rational part of the world of images. […] Graphics owes its special significance to its double function as a storage mechanism and a research instrument." (Jacques Bertin, "Semiology of graphics" ["Semiologie Graphique"], 1967) 

"The symbol is the tool which gives man his power, and it is the same tool whether the symbols are images or words, mathematical signs or mesons." (Jacob Bronowski, "The Reach of Imagination", 1967)

"Truth is a totality, the sum of many overlapping partial images. History, on the other hand, sacrifices totality in the interest of continuity." (Edmund Leach, "Brain-Twister", 1967)

"A manifold can be given by specifying the coordinate ranges of an atlas, the images in those coordinate ranges of the overlapping parts of the coordinate domains, and the coordinate transformations for each of those overlapping domains. When a manifold is specified in this way, a rather tricky condition on the specifications is needed to give the Hausdorff property, but otherwise the topology can be defined completely by simply requiring the coordinate maps to be homeomorphisms." (Richard L Bishop & Samuel I Goldberg, "Tensor Analysis on Manifolds", 1968)

"A thought that is born within thought, an act of thought engendered within its own genealogy, neither given through innateness, nor presupposed in reminiscence, is a thought without image." (Gilles Deleuze, "Difference and Repetition", 1968)

"The theory of thought is like painting: it needs that revolution which took art from representation to abstraction. This is the aim of a theory of thought without image." (Gilles Deleuze, "Difference and Repetition", 1968)

"More than a burial ground for unacceptable ideas and wishes, the unconscious is the spawning ground of intuition and insight, the source of humor, of poetic imagery, and of scientific analogy." (Judith Groch, "The Right to Create", 1969)

"The machine rules. Human life is rigorously controlled by it, dominated by the terribly precise will of mechanisms. These creatures of man are exacting. They are now reacting on their creators, making them like themselves. They want well-trained humans; they are gradually wiping out the differences between men, fitting them into their own orderly functioning, into the uniformity of their own regimes. They are thus shaping humanity for their own use, almost in their own image." (Paul A Valéry, "Fairy Tales for Computers", 1969)

"Visual thinking calls, more broadly, for the ability to see visual shapes as images of the patterns of forces that underlie our existence - the functioning of minds, of bodies or machines, the structure of societies or ideas." (Rudolf Arnheim, "Visual Thinking", 1969)