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What makes people tick? Life can be a trap of ennui, but imagery may be a redemptive escape from dullness. The iconic power and exuberance of images generate an inexorable addiction that needs to be gratified without respite. Here and now! ("Give me more images")
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Erik Pevernagie
“
Christianity taught us to see the eye of the lord looking down upon us. Such forms of knowledge project an image of reality, at the expense of reality itself. They talk figures and icons and signs, but fail to perceive forces and flows. They bind us to other realities, and especially the reality of power as it subjugates us. Their function is to tame, and the result is the fabrication of docile and obedient subjects.
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Gilles Deleuze (Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia)
“
I think of what wild animals are in our imaginations. And how they are disappearing — not just from the wild, but from people’s everyday lives, replaced by images of themselves in print and on screen. The rarer they get, the fewer meanings animals can have. Eventually rarity is all they are made of. The condor is an icon of extinction. There’s little else to it now but being the last of its kind. And in this lies the diminution of the world. How can you love something, how can you fight to protect it, if all it means is loss?
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Helen Macdonald (H is for Hawk)
“
A shame that these images had become iconic, a tune we were all tired of humming.
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Elizabeth Kostova (The Swan Thieves)
“
From what I’d seen in such a short amount of time, the tattoos weren’t just random crap people would regret when they were elderly. The pieces clients got seemed to be so much more than that. They were memorials and declarations. They were outpourings of love and pain. Letters and images, icons and symbolism, personal and eternal. It
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Mariana Zapata (Under Locke)
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I have crusaded across his empire for over a century, raising icons and faiths in his image – and only now he objects? After a hundred years, only now am I told that all I’ve done is wrong?
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Aaron Dembski-Bowden (The First Heretic (The Horus Heresy, #14))
“
Poetry has an immediate effect on the mind. The simple act of reading poetry alters thought patterns and the shuttle of the breath. Poetry induces trance. Its words are chant. Its rhythms drumbeats. Its images become the icons of the inner eye. Poetry is more than a description of the sacred experience; it carries the experience itself.
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Ivan M. Granger
“
But what becomes of the divinity when it reveals itself in icons, when it is simply incarnated in images as a visible theology? Or does it volatilize itself in the simulacra that, alone, deploy their power and pomp of fascination - the visible machinery of icons substituted for the pure and intelligible Idea of God? This is precisely what was feared by Iconoclasts, whose millennial quarrel is still with us today. This is precisely because they predicted this omnipotence of simulacra, the faculty simulacra have of effacing God from the conscience of man, and the destructive, annihilating truth that they allow to appear - that deep down God never existed, even God himself was never anything but his own simulacra - from this came their urge to destroy the images. If they could have believed that these images only obfuscated or masked the Platonic Idea of God, there would have been no reason to destroy them. One can live with the idea of distorted truth. But their metaphysical despair came from the idea that the image didn't conceal anything at all.
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Jean Baudrillard (Simulacra and Simulation)
“
Some believe that as an icon the image of Oscar Wilde is too old and notorious--all right, not an icon, let him be our oriflamme.
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Lara Biyuts (Forever Jocelyn)
“
Sand as far as the eye can see, between the last hills and the sea -- the sea -- in the cold air of an afternoon almost past, and blessed by the wind that always blows from the north.
The beach. And the sea.
It could be perfection -- an image for divine eyes -- a world that happens, that's all, the mute existence of land and water, a work perfectly accomplished, truth --truth -- but once again it is the redeeming grain of a man that jams the mechanism of that paradise, a bagatelle capable on its own of suspending all that great apparatus of inexorable truth, a mere nothing, but one planted in the sand, an imperceptible tear in the surface of that sacred icon, a minuscule exception come to rest on the perfection of that boundless beach. To see him from afar he would be no more than a black dot: amid nothingness, the nothing of a man and a painter's easel. The easel is anchored by slender cords to four stones placed on the sand. It sways imperceptibly in the wind that always blows from the north. The man is wearing waders and a large fisherman's jacket. He is standing, facing the sea, twirling a slim paintbrush between his fingers. On the easel, a canvas.
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Alessandro Baricco (Ocean Sea)
“
Nefertiti Speaks:
Sands of time released my ancient image
to awaken you to the artistry and splendour
of Egypt’s Camelot
No mystery am I
A modern woman trapped in an old time
Go forward, beautiful ladies, and create
new worlds of artistry and beauty
out of the sands of time
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Ramon William Ravenswood (Icons Speak)
“
No murderer had before or has since caused such a sensation, passed so quickly into folklore or gained an image – top hat, cape and Gladstone bag – that is truly iconic: as instantly recognisable as Sherlock Holmes's deerstalker and meerschaum pipe, and as capable of conveying a meaning understood around the world – even by people who know nothing about the Ripper or what he did, or that he, unlike Holmes, actually existed.
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Paul Begg (Jack the Ripper: The Facts)
“
In Russian folklore there is an archetype called yurodivy, or the “Holy Fool.” The Holy Fool is a social misfit—eccentric, off-putting, sometimes even crazy—who nonetheless has access to the truth. Nonetheless is actually the wrong word. The Holy Fool is a truth-teller because he is an outcast. Those who are not part of existing social hierarchies are free to blurt out inconvenient truths or question things the rest of us take for granted. In one Russian fable, a Holy Fool looks at a famous icon of the Virgin Mary and declares it the work of the devil. It’s an outrageous, heretical claim. But then someone throws a stone at the image and the facade cracks, revealing the face of Satan.
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Malcolm Gladwell (Talking to Strangers: What We Should Know About the People We Don’t Know)
“
The image of woman as mother is universal, not specific to any culture. But in India, that image is elevated to iconic status by a society that puts marriage and motherhood at the core of a woman’s existence.
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Ranjani Rao (Rewriting My Happily Ever After - A Memoir of Divorce and Discovery)
“
Signs are of three classes, namely, Icons (or images), Indices, and Symbols. Article 6. An icon is a sign which stands for its object because as a thing perceived it excites an idea naturally allied to the idea that object would excite.
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Charles Sanders Peirce (The Essential Peirce, Volume 2 (1893–1913): Selected Philosophical Writings)
“
The bodies of the newly dead are not debris nor remnant, nor are they entirely icon or essence. They are, rather, changelings, incubates, hatchlings of a new reality that bear our names and dates, our image and likenesses, as surely in the eyes and ears of our children and grandchildren as did word of our birth in the ears of our parents and their parents. It is wise to treat such new things tenderly, carefully, with honor.
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Thomas Lynch (The Undertaking: Life Studies from the Dismal Trade)
“
True wisdom is the moment in the iconic Truman Show where he opens the door, and the doorway is dark. That image is tattooed onto my brain because it’s so relatable to what real growth looks like. Christof tells Truman, “Stay here, stay in this world I have created for you. Stay in the illusion. It’s safe here, and you’re special here. There is no truth out there.
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Brittney Hartley (No Nonsense Spirituality: All the Tools No Belief Required)
“
PREFACE A New Look at the Legacy of Albert Einstein Genius. Absent-minded professor. The father of relativity. The mythical figure of Albert Einstein—hair flaming in the wind, sockless, wearing an oversized sweatshirt, puffing on his pipe, oblivious to his surroundings—is etched indelibly on our minds. “A pop icon on a par with Elvis Presley and Marilyn Monroe, he stares enigmatically from postcards, magazine covers, T-shirts, and larger-than-life posters. A Beverly Hills agent markets his image for television commercials. He would have hated it all,” writes biographer Denis Brian. Einstein is among the greatest scientists of all time, a towering figure who ranks alongside Isaac Newton for his contributions. Not surprisingly, Time magazine voted him the Person of the Century. Many historians have placed him among the hundred most influential people of the last thousand years.
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Michio Kaku (Einstein's Cosmos: How Albert Einstein's Vision Transformed Our Understanding of Space and Time (Great Discoveries))
“
Harman was right: those pictures were worse. But, leaving aside the fact that photographs of death and nudity, however newsworthy, don't get much play in the press, the power of an image does not necessarily reside in what it depicts. A photograph of a mangled cadaver, or of a naked man trussed in torment, can shock and outrage, provoke protest and investigation, but it leaves little to the imagination. It may be rich in practical information while being devoid of any broader meaning. To the extent that it represents any circumstances or conditions beyond itself, it does so generically. Such photographs are repellent in large part because they have a terrible reductive sameness. Except from a forensic point of view, they are unambiguous, and have the quality of pornography. They are what they show, nothing more. They communicate no vision and, shorn of context, they offer little, if anything, to think about, no occasion for wonder. They have no value as symbols.
Of course, the dominant symbol of Western civilization is the figure of a nearly naked man being tortured to death—or more simply, the torture implement itself, the cross. But our pictures of Christ's savage death are the product of religious imagination and idealization. In reality, with his battered flesh scabbed and bleeding and bloated and discolored beneath the pitiless Judean desert sun, he must have been ghastly to behold. Had there been cameras at Calvary, would twenty centuries of believers have been moved to hang photographs of the scene on their altarpieces and in their homes, or to wear an icon of a man being executed around their necks as as an emblem of peace and hope and human fellowship? Photography is too frank to allow for the notion of suffering as noble and ennobling...
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Philip Gourevitch (Standard Operating Procedure)
“
What you think about yourself will ultimately determine how, and if, you lead. What you think about others will determine how you will treat them and lead them. How you see the world will determine what you desire to bring to it.
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Sébastien Richard (Lead Like a Superhero: What Pop Culture Icons Can Teach Us About Impactful Leadership)
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The guilt and anxiety induced by hunting, combined with frustration resulting from ritual celibacy, could have been projected onto the image of a powerful woman, who demands endless bloodshed.27 The hunters could see that women were the source of new life; it was they – not the expendable males – who ensured the continuity of the tribe. The female thus became an awe-inspiring icon of life itself – a life that required the ceaseless sacrifice of men and animals.
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Karen Armstrong (A Short History of Myth)
“
By employing classical concepts of idealized beauty and changes in perspective, icons speak to us of reality transformed and transfigured, both in and through God's presence. They speak of transcendence and mystery. As iconographers, we point to a reality that we have never seen with our own eyes. In fact, all our images of God, heaven, the angels, and the saints, whether in poetry, prose, ritual, music, or icons, represent our limited attempts to speak of the unspeakable.
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Peter Pearson (A Brush with God: An Icon Workbook)
“
We are taught to believe that having deep passions is foolish at best and dangerous at worst. We live in a cultural moment that is suspicious of ardent desires and strong commitments, propagating the idea that few things in life matter, that we have outlived ideals and ethical principles, and that comprehensive cultural change is impossible. Many of us have adopted the view that because we cannot remedy the enormous inequalities of the social world, we should not even bother to try. We have resigned ourselves to the idea that in the long haul nothing we do has any real impact and that caring too much is consequently a waste of our energies. By the same token, our (postmodern and sophisticated) recognition that meaning is inherently relative at times causes us to stop looking for meaning altogether. Though we are surrounded by a multitude of objects, artifacts, cultural icons, and shimmering images, few of these items manage to affect us on a deep level. In some ways, we are increasingly reconciled to the idea that the best we can do is to avoid the more crushing disillusionments of life–that the less we invest ourselves, the more inoculated we are against the misfortunes of the world.
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Mari Ruti
“
People referred to the symbolism of the empty Cross more than once on its journey. It would seem obviously to point to our faith in Jesus’ resurrection. It’s not quite so simple though. The Cross is bare, but in and of itself the empty Cross does not point directly to the Resurrection. It says only that the body of Jesus was removed from the Cross. If a crucifix is a symbol of Good Friday, then it is the image of the empty tomb that speaks more directly of Easter and resurrection. The empty Cross is a symbol of Holy Saturday. It’s an indicator of the reality of Jesus’ death, of His sharing in our mortal coil. At the same time, the empty Cross is an implicit sign of impending resurrection, and it tells us that the Cross is not only a symbol of hatred, violence and inhumanity: it says that the Cross is about something more.
The empty Cross also tells us not to jump too quickly to resurrection, as if the Resurrection were a trump card that somehow absolves us from suffering. The Resurrection is not a divine ‘get-out-of-jail free’ card that immunises people from pain, suffering or death. To jump too quickly to the Resurrection runs the risk of trivialising people’s pain and seemingly mapping out a way through suffering that reduces the reality of having to live in pain and endure it at times. For people grieving, introducing the message of the Resurrection too quickly cheapens or nullifies their sense of loss. The empty Cross reminds us that we cannot avoid suffering and death. At the same time, the empty Cross tells us that, because of Jesus’ death, the meaning of pain, suffering and our own death has changed, that these are not all-crushing or definitive. The empty Cross says that the way through to resurrection must always break in from without as something new, that it cannot be taken hold of in advance of suffering or seized as a panacea to pain. In other words, the empty Cross is a sign of hope. It tells us that the new life of God surprises us, comes at a moment we cannot expect, and reminds us that experiences of pain, grief and dying are suffused with the presence of Christ, the One Who was crucified and is now risen.
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Chris Ryan MGL (In the Light of the Cross: Reflections on the Australian Journey of the World Youth Day Cross and Icon)
“
During my first few months of Facebooking, I discovered that my page had fostered a collective nostalgia for specific cultural icons. These started, unsurprisingly, within the realm of science fiction and fantasy. They commonly included a pointy-eared Vulcan from a certain groundbreaking 1960s television show.
Just as often, though, I found myself sharing images of a diminutive, ancient, green and disarmingly wise Jedi Master who speaks in flip-side down English. Or, if feeling more sinister, I’d post pictures of his black-cloaked, dark-sided, heavy-breathing nemesis. As an aside, I initially received from Star Trek fans considerable “push-back,” or at least many raised Spock brows, when I began sharing images of Yoda and Darth Vader. To the purists, this bordered on sacrilege.. But as I like to remind fans, I was the only actor to work within both franchises, having also voiced the part of Lok Durd from the animated show Star Wars: The Clone Wars.
It was the virality of these early posts, shared by thousands of fans without any prodding from me, that got me thinking. Why do we love Spock, Yoda and Darth Vader so much? And what is it about characters like these that causes fans to click “like” and “share” so readily?
One thing was clear: Cultural icons help people define who they are today because they shaped who they were as children. We all “like” Yoda because we all loved The Empire Strikes Back, probably watched it many times, and can recite our favorite lines. Indeed, we all can quote Yoda, and we all have tried out our best impression of him.
When someone posts a meme of Yoda, many immediately share it, not just because they think it is funny (though it usually is — it’s hard to go wrong with the Master), but because it says something about the sharer. It’s shorthand for saying, “This little guy made a huge impact on me, not sure what it is, but for certain a huge impact. Did it make one on you, too? I’m clicking ‘share’ to affirm something you may not know about me. I ‘like’ Yoda.”
And isn’t that what sharing on Facebook is all about? It’s not simply that the sharer wants you to snortle or “LOL” as it were. That’s part of it, but not the core. At its core is a statement about one’s belief system, one that includes the wisdom of Yoda.
Other eminently shareable icons included beloved Tolkien characters, particularly Gandalf (as played by the inimitable Sir Ian McKellan). Gandalf, like Yoda, is somehow always above reproach and unfailingly epic.
Like Yoda, Gandalf has his darker counterpart. Gollum is a fan favorite because he is a fallen figure who could reform with the right guidance. It doesn’t hurt that his every meme is invariably read in his distinctive, blood-curdling rasp.
Then there’s also Batman, who seems to have survived both Adam West and Christian Bale, but whose questionable relationship to the Boy Wonder left plenty of room for hilarious homoerotic undertones. But seriously, there is something about the brooding, misunderstood and “chaotic-good” nature of this superhero that touches all of our hearts.
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George Takei
“
She could damage the glossy image - and did when she dug up the dirt. It's why the viewers clung to the screen - for the gloss and the dirt. She could be fearless in exposing icons. It's not surprising someone violently objected. Icons have fans, after all, and the word fan is short for fanatic .
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J.D. Robb (Secrets in Death (In Death, #45))
“
Some of these tools were ingenious, including sets of playing cards for Iraq, Egypt, and Afghanistan—regular fifty-two-card decks, but with images and information about archaeological practices, famous cultural sites, and notable artifacts; the reverse sides could be pieced together to form a map of the most iconic site for each country.
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Marilyn Johnson (Lives in Ruins: Archaeologists and the Seductive Lure of Human Rubble)
“
Now the End of the World is an abstraction because it has never happened. It has no existence in the real world. It will cease to be an abstraction only when it happens--if it happens. (I do not claim to know "God's mind" on the subject- -nor to possess any scientific knowledge about a still non- existent future). I see only a mental image & its emotional ramifications; as such I identify it as a kind of ghostly virus, a spook-sickness in myself which ought to be expunged rather than hypochondriacally coddled & indulged. I have come to despise the "End of the World" as an ideological icon held over my head by religion, state, & cultural milieu alike, as a reason for doing nothing.
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Hakim Bey
“
An icon is like a window looking out upon eternity. Behind its two dimensional surface lies the garden of God, which is beyond dimension or size. Every time I entrust myself to these images, move beyond my curious questions about their origin, history, and artistic value, and let them speak to me in their own language, they draw me into closer communion with the God of love.
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Henri J.M. Nouwen (Behold the Beauty of the Lord: Praying with Icons)
“
However, what stores like Urban Outfitters—and every mall goth’s favorite, Hot Topic—offer is unprecedented access to subcultures often out of reach for young people. Those in rural areas without a local witch shop or knowledge about the occultic side of the internet can be introduced to an entire subculture through these stores. Perhaps they will pick up a tarot deck first as a gag gift, and then look further into the ancient practice of divination, and maybe even learn about the feminist history of Pamela Coleman Smith, a member of British occult society the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, who is responsible for creating the iconic images on the ubiquitous Rider-Waite deck. Where democratic dissemination ends and exploitation begins is tricky territory.
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Kristen J. Sollee (Witches, Sluts, Feminists: Conjuring the Sex Positive)
“
This father, indeed, is what the various fathers of the biblical story—from Noah to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, to David—never quite managed to be with their own families. He does what they rarely managed to do with their own power: use it for ever-increasing abundance and blessing. He is an icon of the true image. Indeed, in the holy hilarity of his greeting, the lavishness of his feast, and the eagerness of his pleading, we glimpse not just an image bearer but the very One “from whom every family in heaven and on earth takes its name” (Ephesians 3:15), whose image is meant to be refracted in his sons and daughters. Like him, we are meant to pour out our power fearlessly, spend our privilege recklessly, and leave our status in the dust of our headlong pursuit of love.
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Andy Crouch (Playing God: Redeeming the Gift of Power)
“
warfare would be waged west of the Mississippi as it had been earlier against the Abenakis, Cherokees, Shawnees, Muskogees, and even Christian Indians. In the Civil War, these methods played a prominent role on both sides. Confederate regular forces, Confederate guerrillas such as William Quantrill, and General Sherman for the Union all engaged in waging total war against civilians. The pattern would continue in US military interventions overseas, from the Philippines and Cuba to Central America, Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan. The cumulative effect goes beyond simply the habitual use of military means and becomes the very basis for US American identity. The Indian-fighting frontiersmen and the “valiant” settlers in their circled covered wagons are the iconic images of that identity. The continued popularity of, and respect for, the genocidal sociopath Andrew Jackson is another indicator. Actual men such as Robert Rogers, Daniel Boone, John Sevier, and David Crockett, as well as fictitious ones created by James Fenimore Cooper and other best-selling writers, call to mind D. H. Lawrence’s “myth of the essential white American”—that the “essential American soul” is a killer.
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Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz (An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States (ReVisioning American History, #3))
“
The campaign against cancer, Farber learned, was much like a political campaign: it needed icons, mascots, images, slogans—the strategies of advertising as much as the tools of science. For any illness to rise to political prominence, it needed to be marketed, just as a political campaign needed marketing. A disease needed to be transformed politically before it could be transformed scientifically.
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Siddhartha Mukherjee (The Emperor of All Maladies)
“
The fact that Bernie stole the show at Biden’s inauguration, and that the image of him just sitting there instantly became an icon, indicates that the true world spirit of our time was there, in his lone figure, embodying skepticism about the fake normalization staged in the ceremony. The celebration of his image expressed that there is still hope for our cause; people are aware that radical change is needed.
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Slavoj Žižek (Heaven in Disorder)
“
when Shin needed special-effects scale models to achieve a shot of an exploding train for the climax of Runaway, he asked, tongue-in-cheek, whether Kim wouldn’t just give him instead a real train to blow up. To his surprise, an actual, functioning train was delivered to the set, loaded to the brim with explosives. Shin had only one take to get it right, but that was a lovely problem to have. Runaway’s final train explosion became one of North Korean cinema’s iconic images.
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Paul Fischer (A Kim Jong-Il Production: The Extraordinary True Story of a Kidnapped Filmmaker, His Star Actress, and a Young Dictator's Rise to Power)
“
I think we all need to learn to like ourselves-just the way we are. And if there are moderate ways to improve our looks and if we're doing it for the right reasons (not to impress our friends!), then maybe it's just fine. Beauty is very subjective-meaning that it all depends on your personal taste. I think that's why God made us all different. So instead of turning ourselves into cookie-cutter images of the latest fashion icon, why not take a moment to enjoy our differences?
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Melody Carlson (Meant to Be (Diary of a Teenage Girl: Kim, #2))
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In 1951, a man bought a pickup truck because he needed to load things up and move them. Things like bricks and bags of feed. Somewhere along the line trendsetters and marketers got involved, and now we buy pickups -- big, horse-powered, overbuilt, wide-assed, comfortable pickups -- so that we may stick our key in the ignition of an icon, fire up an image, and drive off in a cloud of connotations. I have no room to talk. I long to get my International running part so I can drive down roads that no longer exist.
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Michael Perry
“
A number inside brackets ([1]) links to a footnote. Images You can zoom large images to full-screen size. For Kindle devices with a 5-Way Controller, select the image, and activate it when the magnifying glass icon appears; on the Kindle Fire device, double-tap on the image; on the Kindle Touch, tap and hold on the image for about a second, then tap on the magnifying glass icon. Navigation You can access the ESV Bible Table of Contents by pressing the MENU button and selecting Table of Contents at any time. This
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Anonymous (Holy Bible: English Standard Version (ESV))
“
The actor Tony Curtis once told me that fame is an occupation in itself, that it is a separate thing. And Tony couldn't be more right. The old image slowly faded and in time I found myself no longer under
the canopy of some malignant influence. Eventually different anachronisms were thrust upon me — anachronisms of lesser dilemma — though they might seem bigger. Legend, Icon, Enigma (Buddha in European Clothes was my favorite) — stuff like that, but that was all right. These titles were placid and harmless, threadbare, easy to get around with them. Prophet, Messiah, Savior — those are tough ones.
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Bob Dylan
“
Ultimately the reason for both the work of evangelism and the work of justice is not simply the relief of suffering, whether present or eternal. It is the restoration of God’s true image in the world, made known in the one true Image and Icon, Jesus Christ, and refracted and reflected in fruitful, multiplying image bearers set free by his death and resurrection to reclaim their true calling. Our mission is not primarily driven by a calculation of which suffering, present or eternal, we need to relieve most urgently; it is the fruit of glorious promises that call us into a new kingdom where the world is full of truth-bearing images. No image bearer can fully return to their true calling without finding themselves rescued and redeemed by the true Image Bearer, so no serious Christian witness in the world can fail to call people to put their trust in Jesus and the true God he makes known. And no image bearer can bear full witness to the glory of the Creator without the conditions for flourishing that are summed up in the rich biblical conception of justice. “He comes to make his blessings flow / far as the curse is found.” Because idolatry and injustice are the twin fruits of the curse, the work of evangelism and the work of justice are one.
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Andy Crouch (Playing God: Redeeming the Gift of Power)
“
Finally, some of the genes identified in certain variants of schizophrenia or bipolar disease actually augment certain abilities. If the most pathological variant of a mental illness can be sifted out or discriminated from the high-functioning variants by genes or gene combinations alone, then we can hope for such a test. But it is much more likely that such a test will have inherent limits: most of the genes that cause disease in one circumstance might be the very genes that cause hyperfunctional creativity in another. As Edvard Munch put it, "[My troubles] are part of me and my art. They are indistinguishable from me, and [treatment] would destroy my art. I want to keep those sufferings." These very "sufferings," we might remind ourselves, were responsible for one of the most iconic images of the twentieth century-of a man so immersed in a psychotic era that he could only scream a psychotic response to it.
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Siddhartha Mukherjee (The Gene: An Intimate History)
“
Your charming charm is a super sexy mega power that is simply impossible to overcome. Sweetest gourmet, I adore your gorgeous body, when I see you, only one word sounds in my head: yum, I will give myself completely to you. I will always love only you unconsciously, unconsciously, your gently erotic image sat in the depths of my mind completely. From your amazingly contagious beauty, your mouth opens and speechless is lost. Dizzyingly, stunningly beautiful, you are like a giant tornado, from which everything attracts you. And the heart and soul yearn all the time only for you. It doesn't matter if you love me or not, the main thing is that I still love you, and in my subconscious mind, I will only love you forever. Your luxurious appearance of the highest quality, this is a workshop, the filigree work of Mother Nature, this is just a masterpiece that constitutes a unique example of true beauty, you have no equal, you are a girl of high caliber. You are absolutely beautiful to such an extent, so beautiful, so exotic, erotic, and your image sounds poetic like very beautiful music of love, that I’m just afraid and shy to come to you, I’m afraid to talk to you, as if standing next to a goddess, or with a super mega star, a world scale model that even aliens probably know. My heart beats more often, I can’t talk normally, from excitement, goosebumps all over my body, and it just shakes. All these are symptoms of true love for you, well, simply: oh), wow). To be your boyfriend and husband is the greatest honor in the world, he knelt before you with flowers in his hands. Your appearance is perfect just like Barbie. You are so beautiful that only you want to have sex forever, countless, infinite number of times. You are unattainable, you are like a star whose light of the soul, like a searchlight, illuminates me in the deep darkness of solitude. In love with you thorough. You are simply amazingly beautiful. You are the best of the best. Goddess of all goddesses, empress of all empresses, queen of all queens. More beautiful you just can not imagine a girl. Sexier than you just can not be anything. Beautiful soul just is not found. There was nothing more perfect than you and never will be, simply because I think so. Laponka, I'm your faithful fan, you are my only idol, idol, icon of beauty. It doesn't matter who you are, I will accept you any. Because in any case I am eager to be only with you. You have a sexy smile, and your sensual look is just awesome. And from your voice and look a pleasant shiver all over your body. You are special, the best that is in all worlds, universes and dimensions. You're just a sight for sore eyes. To you I feel the most powerful, love and sexual inclination. You're cooler than any Viagra and afrodosiak. From your beauty just cling to the constraints and embarrassment.
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NOT A BOOK
“
Most geniuses responsible for the major mutations in the history of thought seem to have certain features in common; on the one hand scepticism, often carried to the point of icon-oclasm, in their attitude towards traditional ideas, axioms and dogmas, towards everything that is taken for granted; on the other hand, an open-mindedness that verges on na- ïve credulity towards new concepts which seem to hold out some promise to their instinctive gropings. Out of this combination results that crucial capacity of perceiving a familiar object, situation, problem, or collection of data, in a sudden new light or new context: of seeing a branch not as part of a tree, but as a potential weapon or tool; of associating the fall of an apple not with its ripeness, but with the motion of the moon. The discoverer perceives relational patterns or functional analogies where nobody saw them before, as the poet perceives the image of a camel in a drifting cloud.
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Anonymous
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The impossibility of exact knowledge is in the physical disintegration which protects the past from our trespasses; it forms a hygiene barrier against mixing with us, the present. For us, this impossibility is an advantage. The owners have left the house, they’ve gone away, and there is no one to see how we are dividing up all their many goods. For the full enjoyment of those olden days we need those who once peopled them to die - then we can begin the yearning process, trying out the role of rightful heirs. The heaped mass of witness accounts only teases us in our hunger: rifle through the bank of pictures, enlarge them, bring them up close to your eyes, spend a lifetime gazing at a single iconic image. It’s all pointless: scoop it all out, to the very bottom of the cup, it’s thin walls, you can walk into the house of the past, but you can’t penetrate it, nor will it enter you, like a chill slick of a ghost that appears out of nowhere in the warm twilight of a July evening.
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Maria Stepanova (In Memory of Memory)
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Mostly I love Halloween because it is the orange-and-black beginning of a season that tumbles into Thanksgiving, which tumbles into Christmas. And Zombies just seem a little out of place in that. Thanksgiving should have nothing to do with armies of shuffling undead. Don’t get me started on Christmas. The only undead at Christmas should be Jacob Marley, wailing about greed.
The iconic image of Halloween should be the pun’kin. The pun’kin, carved into faces that are scary only because we want them to be, winking from every porch. The pun’kin cast in plastic, swinging from the hands of knee-high princesses, leering back from department store shelves, until it gives way to tins of butter cookies.
But I fear for the pun’kin. How long before before he is kicked down the street by zombie hordes, booted into obscurity? Young people tell me that no one—no one— wants to dress up like a pun’kin any more. All a pun’kin does they say is sit there, and glow.
This may be true, all of it, but try to make a pie out of a zombie, and see where that gets you. Though I hear that, when it comes to pies, your canned zombie is the way to go.
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Rick Bragg (Where I Come From: Stories from the Deep South)
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Pilgrimage is premised on the idea that the sacred is not entirely immaterial, but that there is a geography of spiritual power. Pilgrimage walks a delicate line between the spiritual and the material in its emphasis on the story and its setting though the search is for spirituality, it is pursued in terms of the most material details of where the Buddha was born or where Christ died, where the relics are or the holy water flows. Or perhaps it reconciles the spiritual and the material, for to go on pilgrimage is to make the body and its actions express the desires and beliefs of the soul. Pilgrimage unites belief with action, thinking with doing, and it makes sense that this harmony is achieved when the sacred has material presence and location. Protestants, as well as the occasional Buddhist and Jew, have objected to pilgrimages as a kind of icon worship and asserted that the spiritual should be sought within as something wholly immaterial, rather than out in the world.
There is a symbiosis between journey and arrival in Christian pilgrimage, as there is in mountaineering. To travel without arriving would be as incomplete as to arrive without having traveled. To walk there is to earn it, through laboriousness and through the transformation that comes during a journey. Pilgrimages make it possible to move physically, through the exertions of one's body, step by step, toward those intangible spiritual goals that are otherwise so hard to grasp. We are eternally perplexed by how to move toward forgiveness or healing or truth, but we know how to walk from here to there, however arduous the jour ney. Too, we tend to imagine life as a journey, and going on an actual expedition takes hold of that image and makes it concrete, acts it out with the body and the imagination in a world whose geography has become spiritualized. The walker toiling along a road toward some distant place is one of the most compelling and universal images of what it means to be human, depicting the individual as small and solitary in a large world, reliant on the strength of body and will. In pilgrim age, the journey is radiant with hope that arrival at the tangible destination will bring spiritual benefits with it. The pilgrim has achieved a story of his or her ow and in this way too becomes part of the religion made up of stories of travel and transformation.
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Rebecca Solnit (Wanderlust: A History of Walking)
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When Kate Middleton stepped onto the stage, the landscape had changed beyond recognition from the genteel tradition of portraiture of centuries past. News was no longer reported day by day on the front pages of newspapers, but minute by minute via websites and social media. Anyone, anywhere in the world, could discover what Kate was wearing within an hour of her stepping out, with dozens of images capturing every outing from all imaginable angles.
In this unique combination of circumstances, the scene was set for the future Duchess of Cambridge - a sporty, middle class 'normal' girl from Berkshire - to become a new kind of royal style icon. Kate's normality was essential to conjuring her own brand of majestic magic. Her marriage to William saw her living a fairytale that many young girls had dreamed of for generations before her. This was not another aristocratic Sloane Ranger, but a girl who had been born to a flight attendant and flight dispatcher and was now destined to be Queen Consort one day.
A decade on and Kate's effect on fashion is impossible to understate - she has had dresses named after her, set trends, inspired superfans around the world and has been credited with boosting the British fashion industry by up to 1 billion in a single year.
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Bethan Holt (The Duchess of Cambridge: A Decade of Modern Royal Style)
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Like all disappearing forms, art seeks to duplicate itself by means of simulation, but it will nevertheless soon be gone, leaving behind an immense museum of artificial art and abandoning the field completely to advertising.
A dizzying eclecticism of form, a dizzying eclecticism of pleasure - such, already, was the agenda of the baroque. For the baroque, however, the vortex of artifice has a fleshly aspect. Like the practitioners of the baroque, we too are irrepressible creators of images, but secretly we are iconoclasts - not in the sense that we destroy images, but in the sense that we manufacture a profusion of images in which there is nothing to see. Most present-day images - be they video images, paintings, products of the plastic arts, or audiovisual or synthesized images - are literally images in which there is nothing to see. They leave no trace, cast no shadow, and have no consequences. The only feeling one gets from such images is that behind each one there is something that has disappeared. The fascination of a monochromatic picture is the marvellous absence of form - the erasure, though still in the form of art, of all aesthetic syntax. Similarly, the fascination of trans sexuality is the erasure - though in the form of spectacle - of sexual difference. These are images that conceal nothing, that reveal nothing - that have a kind of negative intensity. The only benefit of a Campbell's soup can by Andy Warhol (and it is an immense benefit) is that it releases us from the need to decide between beautiful and ugly, between real and unreal, between transcendence and immanence. Just as Byzantine icons made it possible to stop asking whether God existed - without, for all that, ceasing to believe in him.
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Jean Baudrillard (The Transparency of Evil: Essays in Extreme Phenomena)
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The Unknown Soldier
A tale to tell in bloody rhyme,
A story to last ’til the dawn of end’s time.
Of a loving boy who left dear home,
To bear his countries burdens; her honor to sow.
–A common boy, I say, who left kith and kin,
To battle der Kaiser and all that was therein.
The Arsenal of Democracy was his kind,
–To make the world safe–was their call and chime.
Trained he thus in the far army camps,
Drilled he often in the march and stamp.
Laughed he did with new found friends,
Lived they together for the noble end.
Greyish mottled images clipp’ed and hack´ed–
Black and white broke drum Ʀ…ɧ..λ..t…ʮ..m..ȿ
—marching armies off to ’ttack.
Images scratched, chopped, theatrical exaggerate,
Confetti parades, shouts of high praise
To where hell would sup and partake
with all bon hope as the transport do them take
Faded icons board the ship–
To steel them away collaged together
–joined in spirit and hip.
Timeworn humanity of once what was
To broker peace in eagles and doves.
Mortal clay in the earth but to grapple and smite
As warbirds ironed soar in heaven’s light.
All called all forward to divinities’ kept date,
Heroes all–all aces and fates.
Paris–Used to sing and play at some cards,
A common Joe everybody knew from own heart.
He could have been called ‘the kid’ by the ‘old man,’
But a common private now taking orders to stand.
Receiving letters from his shy sweet one,
Read them over and over until they faded to none.
Trained like hell with his Commander-in-Arms,
–To avoid the dangers of a most bloody harm.
Aye, this boy was mortal, true enough said,
He could be one of thousands alive but now surely dead.
How he sang and cried and ate the gruel of rations,
And grumbled as soldiers do at war’s great contagions.
Out–out to the battle this young did go,
To become a man; the world to show.
(An ocean away his mother cried so–
To return her boy safe as far as the heavens go).
Lay he down in trenched hole,
With balls bursting overhead upon the knoll.
Listened hardnfast to the “Sarge” bearing the news,
—“We’re going over soon—” was all he knew.
The whistle blew; up and over they went,
Charging the Hun, his life to be spent
(“Avoid the gas boys that’ll blister yer arse!!”).
Running through wires razored and deadened trees,
Fell he into a gouge to find in shelter of need
(They say he bayoneted one just as he–,
face to face in War’s Dance of trialed humanity).
A nameless sonnuvabitch shell then did untimely RiiiiiiiP
the field asunder in burrrstzʑ–and he tripped.
And on the field of battle’s blood did he die,
Faceless in a puddle as blurrs of ghosting men
shrieked as they were fleeing by–.
Perished he alone in the no man’s land,
Surrounded by an army of his brother’s teeming bands . . .
And a world away a mother sighed,
Listened to the rain and lay down and cried.
. . . Today lays the grave somber and white,
Guarded decades long in both the dark and the light.
Silent sentinels watch o’er and with him do walk,
Speak they neither; their duty talks.
Lone, stark sentries perform the unsmiling task,
–Guarding this one dead–at the nation’s bequest.
Cared over day and night in both rain or sun,
Present changing of the guard and their duty is done
(The changing of the guard ’tis poetry motioned
A Nation defining itself–telling of
rifles twirl-clicking under the intensest of devotions).
This poem–of The Unknown, taken thus,
Is rend eternal by Divinity’s Iron Trust.
How he, a common soldier, gained the estate
Of bearing his countries glory unto his unknown fate.
Here rests in honored glory a warrior known but to God,
Now rests he in peace from the conflict path he trod.
He is our friend, our family, brother, our mother’s son
–belongs he to us all,
For he has stood in our place–heeding God’s final call.
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Douglas M. Laurent
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One of the greatest difficulties we human beings seem to have is to relinquish long-held ideas. Many of us are addicted to being right, even if facts do not support us. One fixed image we cling to, as iconic in today’s culture as the devil was in previous ages, is that of the addict as an unsavoury and shadowy character, given to criminal activity. What we don’t see is how we’ve contributed to making him a criminal.
There is nothing more intrinsically criminal in the average drug user than in the average cigarette smoker or alcohol addict. The drugs they inject or inhale do not themselves induce criminal activity by their pharmacological effect, except perhaps in the way that alcohol can also fuel a person’s pent-up aggression and remove the mental inhibitions that thwart violence. Stimulant drugs may have that effect on some users, but narcotics like heroin do not; on the contrary, they tend to calm people down. It is withdrawal from opiates that makes people physically ill, irritable and more likely to act violently — mostly out of desperation to
replenish their supply.
The criminality associated with addiction follows directly from the need to raise money to purchase drugs at prices that are artificially inflated owing to their illegality. The addict shoplifts, steals and robs because it’s the only way she can obtain the funds to pay the dealer. History has demonstrated many times over that people will transgress laws and resist coercion when it comes to struggling for their basic needs — or what they perceive as such.
Sam Sullivan, Vancouver’s quadriplegic mayor, told a conference on drug addiction once that if wheelchairs were illegal, he would do anything to get one, no matter what laws he had to break. It was an apt comparison: the hardcore addict feels equally handicapped without his substances. As we have seen, many addicts who deal in drugs do so exclusively to finance their habit. There is no profit in it for them.
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Gabor Maté (In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction)
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Certain shapes and patterns hover over different moments in time, haunting and inspiring the individuals living through those periods. The epic clash and subsequent resolution of the dialectic animated the first half of the nineteenth century; the Darwinian and social reform movements scattered web imagery through the second half of the century. The first few decades of the twentieth century found their ultimate expression in the exuberant anarchy of the explosion, while later decades lost themselves in the faceless regimen of the grid. You can see the last ten years or so as a return to those Victorian webs, though I suspect the image that has been burned into our retinas over the past decade is more prosaic: windows piled atop one another on a screen, or perhaps a mouse clicking on an icon. These shapes are shorthand for a moment in time, a way of evoking an era and its peculiar obsessions. For individuals living within these periods, the shapes are cognitive building blocks, tools for thought: Charles Darwin and George Eliot used the web as a way of understanding biological evolution and social struggles; a half century later, the futurists embraced the explosions of machine-gun fire, while Picasso used them to re-create the horrors of war in Guernica. The shapes are a way of interpreting the world, and while no shape completely represents its epoch, they are an undeniable component of the history of thinking. When I imagine the shape that will hover above the first half of the twenty-first century, what comes to mind is not the coiled embrace of the genome, or the etched latticework of the silicon chip. It is instead the pulsing red and green pixels of Mitch Resnick’s slime mold simulation, moving erratically across the screen at first, then slowly coalescing into larger forms. The shape of those clusters—with their lifelike irregularity, and their absent pacemakers—is the shape that will define the coming decades. I see them on the screen, growing and dividing, and I think: That way lies the future.
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Steven Johnson (Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software)
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Once the icon appears, you can then easily start using it by logging in to your Evernote account on web clipper. Then every time you see some content on the internet that you’d like to save, simply click on the Web Clipper tab and it will give you a number of options to save it in the right notebooks and by tagging them appropriately. The Web Clipper also gives you the option to either save the whole page, just the URL or just the image or all of it. So you can
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David Garcia (The Complete Guide to Evernote: Including Tips, Tutorials and other Evernote Essentials!)
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It" is the idea of him or her that resides in us--inspired by the "Something" in them, as Pope has it, "That gives us back the Image of our Mind." Although the perception of It must be excited by some extraordinary perturbation in the looks and personality of the adored, the aura that It broadcasts arises not merely from the singularity of an original, as Walter Benjamin supposed, but also from the fabulous success of its reproducibility in the imaginations of many others, charmed exponentially by the number of its copies. The one-of-kind item must become a type, a replicable role-icon of itself--from "a Charles Hart" or "a Nell Gwyn" to "a Mary Pickford" or "a Douglas Fairbanks"--in order to unleash the Pygmalion effect in the hearts and minds of the fans, making the idea of him or her theirs--as much or more than anything else they might call their own.
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Joseph Roach (It)
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The metaclimate in America during gen X’s youth was marked by declining national self-esteem. We grew up in the shadow of Watergate and the Vietnam War (the first war America ever lost), we watched the Iran hostage crisis stretch on through 1979 and 1980, and we feared the potential nuclear apocalypse of the long Cold War with the Soviet Union, which seemed as powerful as America, or perhaps more so, making it difficult for us to cling to the image our parents had taken for granted. Even Henry Kissinger said that we had passed our historic high point. It appeared as though we were in the twilight of America as a dominant nation; you didn’t have to be paying close attention to geopolitics to see that. At home, in the 1970s, we had three
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Touré (I Would Die 4 U: Why Prince Became an Icon)
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The job of the terrorists was to penetrate into our subconscious. This had always been the aim of writers, but the terrorists took it a step further. They were the writers of our age. Don DeLillo said this many years before 9/11. The images they created spread around the globe, colonising our our subconscious minds. The tangible outcome of the attack, the numbers of dead and injured, the material destruction, meant nothing. It was the images that were important. The more iconic the images they managed to create, the more successful their actions. The attack on the World Trade Centre was the most successful of all time. There weren’t that many dead, only a couple of thousand, as against the six hundred thousand who died in the first two days of the Battle Of Flanders in the autumn of 1914, yet the images were so iconic and powerful that the effect on us was just as devastating, perhaps more so, since we lived in a culture of images.
Planes and skyscrapers. Icarus and Babel.
They wanted into our dreams. Everyone did. Our inner beings were the final market. Once they were conquered, we would be sold.
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Karl Ove Knausgaard (My Struggle: Book 6)
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Moreover, it is important to recognize that notions of self-fashioning were circulating in Renaissance Europe not only among members of the rising middle class but also in writings addressed to monarchs. Consider, for example, Machiavelli’s Prince or the various Mirrors for Princes of the early modern period, which advocate that monarchs carefully manipulate their image in order to solidify their authority and to mask the exercise of coercive power, for, as Machiavelli writes, the vulgar are always taken by what a thing seems to be and by what comes of it; and in the world there are only the vulgar, for the few find a place there only when the many have no ground to rest on (2002) (for more on Putin and Machiavelli,
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Helena Goscilo (Putin as Celebrity and Cultural Icon (BASEES/Routledge Series on Russian and East European Studies Book 80))
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I stop at the image of me between Darren and Nina, the Colosseum stretching up behind us. It’s such an iconic structure, at first glance someone might think we were Photoshopped in front of it. But I know the truth. And I can feel it. The sticky heat of Rome’s summer air, the chatter of languages blending together. The hand at my lower back.
My face stares back at me, only a couple of weeks younger than I am now, but the difference is shocking. There’s more color and life to me now, thanks to my sun-kissed skin and my rich chocolate hair. I’ve gotten so used to seeing the me in the mirror that this pale, untraveled girl in the photo seems like someone else. She was still waiting.
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Kristin Rae (Wish You Were Italian (If Only . . . #2))
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There are many times when I cannot pray, when I am too tired to read the gospels, too restless to have spiritual thoughts, too depressed to find words for God, or too exhausted to do anything. But I can still look at these images so intimately connected with the experience of love.
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Henri J.M. Nouwen (Behold the Beauty of the Lord: Praying with Icons)
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In judging of the Russian priesthood of the present time, we must call to mind this severe school through which it has passed, and we must also take into consideration the spirit which has been for centuries predominant in the Eastern Church—I mean the strong tendency both in the clergy and in the laity to attribute an inordinate importance to the ceremonial element of religion. Primitive mankind is everywhere and always disposed to regard religion as simply a mass of mysterious rites which have a secret magical power of averting evil in this world and securing felicity in the next. To this general rule the Russian peasantry are no exception, and the Russian Church has not done all it might have done to eradicate this conception and to bring religion into closer association with ordinary morality. Hence such incidents as the following are still possible: A robber kills and rifles a traveller, but he refrains from eating a piece of cooked meat which he finds in the cart, because it happens to be a fast-day; a peasant prepares to rob a young attache of the Austrian Embassy in St. Petersburg, and ultimately kills his victim, but before going to the house he enters a church and commends his undertaking to the protection of the saints; a housebreaker, when in the act of robbing a church, finds it difficult to extract the jewels from an Icon, and makes a vow that if a certain saint assists him he will place a rouble's-worth of tapers before the saint's image!
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Donald Mackenzie Wallace (Russia)
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Think Iconic. Even if you’re not in the marketing biz, it will serve you well to crystallize your thinking by leveraging an image that can symbolize your idea, or the spirit of it. And if you are in the marketing business, you’re simply required by law to think this way. Whatever presentations you make, whatever products you sell, whomever you’re trying to convince—never forget the power of an image to galvanize your audience. Note that there’s a big difference between finding a great image and decorating a PowerPoint presentation. There’s too much decorating in the world already, and for the most part it’s meaningless. Find a conceptual image that actually captures the essence of your idea. Be simple and be strong. The same principle applies whether you’re talking to colleagues or to the public. Over time, a conceptual image gives people an easy way to identify your company, your idea or your product. Memorable images often communicate more effectively than words—which is why those who value Simplicity tend to rely on them.
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Ken Segall (Insanely Simple: The Obsession That Drives Apple's Success)
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Plain crosses replaced images of Christ and the saints in other parts of the empire, as in the apse of the Church of the Koimesis of the Virgin at Nicaea, where a cross supplanted a mosaic image of the Virgin.32 After the reaffirmation of the orthodoxy of icons in the ninth century, iconophiles removed the cross and reinstalled an image of the Theotokos holding the Christ child.
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Robin M. Jensen (The Cross: History, Art, and Controversy)
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Thus, the Opus Caroli Regis, while provoked by the decrees of the Seventh Ecumenical Council, is better understood as a document that addressed concerns regarding the role of religious images in Frankish territories. While condemning superstitious adoration of icons, the document also decries the actual destruction of religious images that have even limited pedagogical or decorative value. Yet, although the work equally denounced both iconoclasts and iconophiles, it ultimately contributed to the condemnation of Nicaea II at the synod of Frankfurt in 794, albeit over Pope Hadrian’s official ratification of the Council’s decrees
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Robin M. Jensen (The Cross: History, Art, and Controversy)
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When Ask met Embla he was overcome with joy, allured by her beauty, and filled with gratitude for the marvelous partner he’d been given. He ruled not over her, nor she over him. They were equal in dignity, though distinct in constitution. Together, male and female bore children—thus, they fulfilled their own divine image, becoming makers themselves. Their progeny, in turn, helped to maintain the balance between the garden groves and the skies. “Meanwhile, Taranus, Hu-Esus, and Beli came together and placed an icon amongst men. A great tree, rooted in the ground yet elevating its branches toward the skies. It served as an image of the All Father’s character, a reminder of the role man and woman were to serve by maintaining balance in Abred, the natural realm. By reaching to the Tree, the soul of man and woman together participated in Gwynfydd, a place beyond though not above the natural realm, a place where they could hold together the mysteries of nature.
Yet the most prominent of the Great Tree’s progeny, while matching the Great Tree in beauty, differed in character. The Great Tree had always taken from the land no more and no less than it needed. It reached to the sun and absorbed waters from the nearby wellsprings, but never in excess. The Great Tree exemplified balance and harmony in Abred. Insofar as Ask and Embla maintained the balance of things, respected the agency of each element and creature, the Great Tree was a true Tree of Life. It nourished them in kind, channeling Awen into their souls. “The other tree, its progeny, rebelled against its own nature. It sought not balance nor harmony between the elements, but its own magnificence. It took from the land not as the land would freely give, but whatever it might use at the land’s expense. It could take no more light than the sun would offer, but drawing in all moisture from every surrounding wellspring and from the air itself, the temperate sun no longer exhibited a pleasant warmth, but a scorching heat. “But Ask and Embla, blinded by this Wayward Tree’s magnificence, failed to see its true character. Allured by its fruit, they took from it and ate. Thus, Ask and Embla came to resemble the Wayward Tree and forgot the Tree of Life. “Enraged by what he had seen, how his likeness had departed from Awen and the way of the Great Tree of Life, the All Father—Taranus, Hu-Esus, and Beli—dispatched an emissary, the one known as Michael, to Earth to salvage what had been lost.
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Theophilus Monroe (Gates of Eden: The Druid Legacy 1-4)
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In Constantinople, the people wondered if their revered religious images – icons – were graven images banned in the Ten Commandments. The caliph had just banned such imagery, and though Constantinople had survived, he was victorious on many fronts. Emperor Leo and many others concluded that their own idolatry explained their disasters. The emperor’s campaign to destroy icons launched ninety years of eikonomachia – a self-destructive battle between iconoclasts and iconophiles, each keen to win salvation after death, that cost thousands of lives and consumed Constantinopolitan politics.
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Simon Sebag Montefiore (The World: A Family History of Humanity)
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An icon blinked discreetly in one corner of her interface, its yellow glow unappealing beside the corner the salmon and coral of Coffin’s taut-stretched innards. Accepting the contact was just a matter of an eye-flick. There was a decoding shimmer and one side of the interface spawned an image of Coffin in life.
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Elizabeth Bear (Shoggoths in Bloom and Other Stories)
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But what becomes of the divinity when it reveals itself in icons, when it is multiplied in simulacra? Does it remain the supreme power that is simply incarnated in images as a visible theology? Or does it volatilize itself in the simulacra that, alone, deploy their power and pomp of fascination - the visible machinery of icons substituted for the pure and intelligible Idea of God?
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Jean Baudrillard (Simulacra and Simulation)
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You can increase the size of an image in a Kindle book for easier viewing. Press and hold your finger on the image and then release to display a magnifying-glass icon, and then tap on the icon. To return the image to normal size, tap on the image again. For select Kindle books, you can zoom in further by placing two fingers close together on the center of the screen and moving
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Amazon (Kindle Paperwhite User's Guide 2nd Edition)
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But a product by itself does not a movement make. People tend to gather and rally around ideas, and usually those ideas have to be expressed in a certain way to get folks fired up. This is the reason why social movements are often associated with iconic images, symbols, or flags; it’s also the reason why many movements develop rallying cries, phrases and words that come to mean something very deep to the people within the movement.
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Scott Goodson (Uprising: How to Build a Brand--and Change the World--By Sparking Cultural Movements)
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Imaging via a pocket ultrasound device decidedly transcends the antique stethoscope from 1816, regarded as the icon of medicine.
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Eric J. Topol (The Patient Will See You Now: The Future of Medicine is in Your Hands)
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The icon of the Bible as God's textbook for the world is as bankrupt as the idea that it stands for, of religious faith as absolute black-and-white certainty. Just as the cultural icon of the flag often becomes a substitute for patriotism, and just as the cultural icon of the four-wheel-drive truck often becomes a substitute for manly independence and self-confidence, so the cultural icon of the Bible often becomes a substitute for a vital life of faith, which calls not for obedient adherence to clear answers but thoughtful engagement with ultimate questions. The Bible itself invites that kind of engagement. The iconic image of it as a book of answers discourages it.
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Timothy Beal (The Rise and Fall of the Bible: The Unexpected History of an Accidental Book)
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Tim Graham
Tim Graham has specialized in photographing the Royal Family for more than thirty years and is foremost in his chosen field. Recognition of his work over the years has led to invitations for private sessions with almost all the members of the British Royal Family, including, of course, Diana, Princess of Wales, and her children.
Her “magic” was a combination of style and compassion. She instinctively knew what was right for every occasion. One of my favorite photographs is a shot I took in Angola in 1997 that shows her with a young land-mine victim who had lost a leg. This image of the Princess was chosen by the Red Cross to appear on a poster to publicize the tragic reality of land mines. It’s an important part of her legacy. It is difficult to capture such a remarkable person in just one photo, but I like this one a lot because it sums up her warmth and concern. Diana had one of those faces that would be very hard to photograph badly. Over the years, there were times when she was fed up or sad, and those emotions I captured, too. They were relevant at the time. I felt horrified by the news of her death and that she could die in such a terrible, simply tragic way. I couldn’t conceive of how her sons would be able to cope with such a loss. I was asked just before the funeral to photograph Prince Charles taking William and Harry out in public for the first time so they could meet the crowds gathered at Kensington Palace and see the floral tributes. It was the saddest of occasions.
I had by then received an invitation to the funeral and was touched to have been the only press photographer asked. After much deliberation, I decided to turn down the chance to be a guest in Westminster Abbey. Having photographed Diana for seventeen years, from the day she appeared as Prince Charles’s intended, right through her public and, on occasion by invitation, her private life, I felt that I had to take the final picture. It was the end of an era. From my press position at the door of the abbey, I watched everyone arrive for the service, including my wife, who had also been invited. During my career, I have witnessed so many historic events from the other side of a camera that I felt compelled to take that last photograph of the Princess’s story.
Life has moved on, and the public have found other subjects to fascinate them--not least the now grownup sons of this international icon--but everyone knows Diana was unique.
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Larry King (The People's Princess: Cherished Memories of Diana, Princess of Wales, From Those Who Knew Her Best)
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Brain scans have shown that high-end brands evoke the same neural response as religious images; that, shocking and lamentable though it may be, an iPod has the same effect as Mother Teresa. Also, the windows displaying these material icons extend from floor to ceiling, completely exposing the bright interiors, and the entrances are wide and doorless, so the instinctive fear of entering an unfamiliar enclosed space is overcome. Inside, young, attractive sales staff approach, seeking eye contact with friendly encouraging smiles, creating the illusion of youth and attractiveness in the shopper. The loud soul music suggests a bar or club where mutual attraction can blossom but, unlike the brutally competitive bars and clubs, here there is no possibility of rejection. Spending money is the easiest orgasm. Open the wallet and flash the bright card.
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Michael Foley (The Age of Absurdity: Why Modern Life makes it Hard to be Happy)
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Head in the car. Although another iconic image is that of a dog sticking his head out a car window, it’s dangerous to let your dog do that. Countless injuries occur from flying debris.
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Dawn Sylvia-Stasiewicz (Training the Best Dog Ever: A 5-Week Program Using the Power of Positive Reinforcement)
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Done button. Enhanced viewing mode Enhanced viewing of images and tables is available for select Kindle books, enabling you to both pan and zoom. Press and hold your finger on the image or table and then release to display a magnifying-glass icon. Tap the icon to enter enhanced viewing mode. To zoom in further, place two fingers close together on the center of the screen and move them apart. To zoom out, place two fingers a
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Amazon (Kindle User's Guide)
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10. Stores have massively excessive verbal communication. Products and packaging are a significant part of the clutter. Using iconic images, colors, shapes, and appropriate emotional totems is a better way to connect to shoppers than more words.
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Herb Sorensen (Inside the Mind of the Shopper: The Science of Retailing)
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magnifying-glass icon, and then tap on the icon. To return the image to normal size,
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Amazon (Kindle Paperwhite User's Guide 2nd Edition)
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Finally, then, I conclude with an iconic image of that foundational reconciliation from the later fourth century. It is a bronze hanging lamp from the villa of the aristocratic Valerii on the Celian Hill in Rome, now preserved in the National Archaeological Museum in Florence. The lamp is shaped like a boat. Peter is seated in the stern at the tiller. Paul is standing in the prow looking forward. Peter steers. Paul guides. And the boat sails full before the wind.
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Marcus J. Borg (The First Paul: Reclaiming the Radical Visionary Behind the Church's Conservative Icon)
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What the image always wants to do in worship is to distract us from hearing the Word. The crucifix, the icon, the drama, and the dance — these things are not aids to worship but make true worship all but impossible. In a visual age we need to be all the more careful not to look at the image but to listen to the Word.
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Anonymous
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The term has been used to situate the articulation of the mythic within painting, theatre and cinema, and could be conceived of as cultural work which seeks to bind a multiply layered dynamic into a unitary image. In Geeta Kapur's definition the iconic is `an image into which symbolic meanings converge and in which moreover they achieve stasis.' This concept of the iconic needs to be grounded within a conception of mise-en-scene, and it is here that the question of frontal address surfaces.
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Anonymous
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The transitional nature of the 1920's can also be discerned in what may be labeled a new kind of 'dvoeverie' (or dual faith), a syncretistic belief that combined peasant ways and new Communist practices in tentative and uneasy assimilation. For example, there were reports of portraits of Lenin or Kalinin turning up in icon corners and of habit-ridden old peasants crossing themselves in front of these holy images.
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Lynne Viola (Peasant Rebels Under Stalin: Collectivization and the Culture of Peasant Resistance)
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Yoko Ono: One Woman Show, 1960-1971,” opening on May 17 in one of MoMA’s prestigious sixth-floor galleries, is a major event of the museum’s summer season. On display will be more than 100 vintage works — and in a few cases, as with the burned canvas, facsimiles — that represent the heyday of Ms. Ono’s first career in art, long overshadowed by her better-known image as pop-culture icon and widow of John Lennon. A great deal is riding on the event — for
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Anonymous
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Once again, eternity is peering through the latticework of time and space, and this sense of eternal stillness and deep freedom is what the iconic image of the seated Buddha conveys. What this image doesn’t convey is a sense of humanity, of a real flesh-and-blood human being. But in the Jesus story, it’s as if the still point that the image of the Buddha evokes within us becomes
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Adyashanti (Resurrecting Jesus: Embodying the Spirit of a Revolutionary Mystic)
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position an exploding seashell near where Fidel Castro snorkeled in Cuba. The iconic image of the hearings came when committee members passed around a pistol that the CIA had built to shoot poison darts and Senator Barry Goldwater pointed the gun into the air as he looked through its sights. CIA director William Colby tried to make clear that the weapon had never been used, but the image endured. Before the committee had even wrapped up its work, President Ford signed an executive order banning the government from carrying out assassinations of foreign heads of state or other foreign politicians.
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Mark Mazzetti (The Way of the Knife)
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Such street culture is simply the black urban version of one of America’s most iconic traditions: the Wild West. America’s first gangsta thugs were Billy the Kid and Jesse James. In the youth thug cultures of both the Wild West and the inner cities, America sees inverted images of its own most iconic values, one through rose-tinted glass, the other through a glass, darkly. While there is some
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Anonymous
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You can increase the size of an image in a Kindle book for easier viewing. Press and hold your finger on the image and then release to display a magnifying-glass icon, and then tap on the icon. To return the image to normal size, tap on the image again. For select Kindle books, you can zoom in further by placing two fingers close together on the center of the screen and
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Amazon (Kindle Paperwhite User's Guide 2nd Edition)
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To be honest, I was uneasy about Steve. He had a forceful personality, whereas I do not, and I felt threatened by him. For all of my talk about the importance of surrounding myself with people smarter than myself, his intensity was at such a different level, I didn’t know how to interpret it. It put me in the mind of an ad campaign that the Maxell cassette tape company released around this time, featuring what would become an iconic image: a guy sitting low in a leather-and-chrome Le Corbusier chair, his long hair being literally blown back by the sound from the stereophonic speaker in front of him. That’s what it was like to be with Steve. He was the speaker. Everyone else was the guy.
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Ed Catmull (Creativity, Inc.: Overcoming the Unseen Forces That Stand in the Way of True Inspiration)
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sobered, nodded awkwardly, and acted like he wanted to speak, but didn’t. He turned to a laptop, gave it a command. The screens on the wall displayed what looked at first glance like a collage of images. At center was a photograph Acadia had recently taken of Alex Cross’s house from across Fifth Street. Dotted lines traveled from various windows in the house out to pictures of Dr. Alex, his wife, his grandmother, his daughter, and his younger son. Set off to one side was a framed picture of Damon, Alex Cross’s older son, seventeen and a student at a prep school in western Massachusetts. Digital lines went out from each portrait, linked to images of schools, police stations, churches, grocery stores, and various friends. There were also lines connecting each member of Cross’s family to calendar and clock icons. “He uses mind-mapping software and an Xbox 360 with Kinect to make it work,” Acadia explained. “It’s interactive, Marcus. Just stand in front of the camera and point to what you want.” Intrigued now, Sunday stepped in front of the screens and the Kinect camera. He pointed at the photograph of Cross. The screen instantly jumped to a virtual diary of the detective’s recent life, everything from photographs of Bree Stone, to his kids, to his white Chevy sedan and his best friend, John Sampson, and Sampson’s wife, Billie. Sunday pointed at the calendar, and the screens showed a chronological account of everything he had seen Cross do in the prior month.
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James Patterson (Cross My Heart (Alex Cross, #21))
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Why Exercise Is Important to Stan Aside from the self-image and performance aspects: “It also puts discipline in the day. I find that if the day is terrible, but I worked out, at the end of the day I’ll go, ‘Well, I had a good workout,’ almost no matter what happens. When
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Timothy Ferriss (Tools of Titans: The Tactics, Routines, and Habits of Billionaires, Icons, and World-Class Performers)
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Jesus Christ is called “the image of the invisible God” (Colossians 1:15). The Greek word used for image in the passage is eikon, from which we get the word icon. Jesus Christ is the only exact icon or physical representation of the invisible and unrepresentable deity. “For in Christ all the fullness of the Deity lives in bodily form” (Colossians 2:9). This is what paganism attempts with its idols—having a point of contact with God. By being close to the idol, the worshiper hopes to be close to God, for to his mind the idol possesses some degree of deity in itself. But just as God ridiculed the pagan idols as being blind, deaf, and dumb, so surely did Jesus Christ not only possess sight, hearing, and speech but give sight to the blind, hearing to the deaf, and speech to the dumb. He was God in the flesh, walking among us, talking to us, eating with us, weeping with us.
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Michael Scott Horton (The Law of Perfect Freedom: Relating to God and Others through the Ten Commandments)
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WHY EXERCISE IS IMPORTANT TO STAN Aside from the self-image and performance aspects: “It also puts discipline in the day. I find that if the day is terrible, but I worked out, at the end of the day I’ll go, ‘Well, I had a good workout,’ almost no matter what happens.
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Timothy Ferriss (Tools of Titans: The Tactics, Routines, and Habits of Billionaires, Icons, and World-Class Performers)
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From Apple’s iconic “Think Different” campaign in 1997 featuring images of Gandhi and Einstein and Bob Dylan (and no Apple products) to its later silhouetted hipsters grooving to music on their iPods (with the ubiquitous white earbuds connected to white cords streaking down their lithe bodies), Apple has excelled at selling a lifestyle.
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Adam Lashinsky (Inside Apple)
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That evening was marked by yet another magic moment in Ozzy lore as local Chicago photographer, Paul Natkin, captured the iconic onstage image of Ozzy lifting Randy by his arm during a guitar solo. The photo later graced the cover of the Randy Rhoads Tribute album.
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Rudy Sarzo (Off the Rails: Aboard the Crazy Train in the Blizzard of Ozz)
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Now, I regarded my opponent carefully, as if we were sitting across from each other over a chessboard. Zagaev had a round head, a double chin that his beard obscured pretty well and bristly hair that couldn’t decide to be gray or less gray. His age, duBois had reported, was only forty-three. His head was large, his pallor anemic. He nervously gripped and ungripped his hands every few seconds. I knew this only because I heard the tinkle of cuffs behind his back. He wore a thick gold chain around his neck and an amulet on which was an unlikely icon. I was pretty sure it was Tsar Alexander II, who I knew from my studies was a moderate reformer—by absolute-ruler standards—in mid-nineteenth-century Russia. Still, it was curious that a Chechnyan would choose this particular image. Zagaev’s clothes were expensive, more than I could afford, more than I wanted to. His suit was cut from vibrant blue silk, the color of the sky in a child’s fantasy book. His snakeskin shoes glittered in the jarring overhead light. His sweat was repulsive; I could smell body odor and onions from across the table. I
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Jeffery Deaver (Edge)
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Female status in Pre-Seizure culture was predicated on appetite control. But a woman in control of her desire did not function economically, and so loops were inserted into culture to accelerate female bonding in acts of over-consumption that defied restraint. These loops gave permission for loss of control. He loved the paradoxes of Pre-Seizure culture: on the one hand, building up an iconicity of self-control around images of thinness and athletic discipline, and on the other, unpicking that self-control to create necessary doubt and need. It must have been maddening to live through.
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Matthew De Abaitua (The Destructives (The Seizure Trilogy Book 3))
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a television bomb would instantly blind you with its eruption of images as its icons burned through your flesh and imprinted themselves on your bones in tiny hieroglyphs that recounted the brief history of the body’s destruction.
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Jeff VanderMeer (The Weird: A Compendium of Strange and Dark Stories)
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of uniformed and plain-clothed officers, and a tent, and the allure was too much to resist. Even the tourists were ignoring two of the region’s most iconic views—the booming image of Mount Rainier dominating the
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Robert Dugoni (The Trapped Girl (Tracy Crosswhite, #4))
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which a drawing imported into a text document can no longer be altered, but must be changed in the original graphics program and reintroduced into the text document.) Out of the box the Star was multilingual, offering typefaces and keyboard configurations that could be implemented in the blink of an eye for writing in Russian, French, Spanish, and Swedish through the use of “virtual keyboards”—graphic representations of keyboards that appeared on screen to show the user where to find the unique characters in whatever language he or she was using. In 1982 an internal library of 6,000 Japanese kanji characters was added; eventually Star users were able to draft documents in almost every modern language, from Arabic and Bengali to Amharic and Cambodian. As the term implied, the user’s view of the screen resembled the surface of a desk. Thumbnail-sized icons representing documents were lined up on one side of the screen and those representing peripheral devices—printers, file servers, e-mail boxes—on the other. The display image could be infinitely personalized to be tidy or cluttered, obsessively organized or hopelessly confused, alphabetized or random, as dictated by the user’s personality and taste. The icons themselves had been painstakingly drafted and redrafted so they would be instantaneously recognized by the user as document pages (with a distinctive dog-eared upper right corner), file folders, in and out baskets, a clock, and a wastebasket. Thanks to the system’s object-oriented software, the Star’s user could launch any application simply by clicking on the pertinent icon; the machine automatically “knew” that a text document required it to launch a text editor or a drawing to launch a graphics program. No system has ever equaled the consistency of the Star’s set of generic commands, in which “move,” “copy,” and “delete” performed similar operations across the entire spectrum of software applications. The Star was the epitome of PARC’s user-friendly machine. No secretary had to learn about programming or code to use the machine, any more than she had to understand the servomechanism driving the dancing golf ball to type on an IBM Selectric typewriter. Changing a font, or a margin, or the space between typed lines in most cases required a keystroke or two or a couple of intuitive mouse clicks. The user understood what was happening entirely from watching the icons or documents move or change on the screen. This was no accident: “When everything in a computer system is visible on the screen,” wrote David Smith, a designer of the Star interface, “the display becomes reality. Objects and actions can be understood purely in terms of their effects on the display.
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Michael A. Hiltzik (Dealers of Lightning: Xerox PARC and the Dawn of the Computer Age)
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The modern world tends to think of the Holy Grail as a priceless chalice, the cup used by Christ at the Last Supper, sought after through constant danger by the likes of Indiana Jones. The truth, however, is much more ancient and much more interesting. The Grail and its companion icon, the sword or spear, have served as magical images since pagan times, and today, over two thousand years later, they are still used in the rituals of ceremonial magicians, witches and Druids.
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Philip Carr-Gomm (The Book of English Magic)
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In the end, our evaluation of what is ‘good’ can be entirely subjective. Our brains are pushed and pulled by the powerful synergy of memory, culture and images. So our concept of the right house, car or neighbourhood might be as much a result of happy moments from our past or images that flood us in popular media as of any rational analysis of how these elements will influence the moments of our lives. Given the images that the contemporary city dweller’s hippocampi has filed away, this information storm can easily lead to unreasonable expectations. Consider a little girl’s first dream home: the dollhouse. When the toy manufacturer Mattell held a contest to create a new home for their iconic Barbie toy in 2011, the winning design was the equivalent of a 4,880-square-foot glass mansion on three acres.19 Estimated construction cost in real life: $3.5 million. As sure as that house was pink, its dimensions will be transposed onto the aspirations of a generation of girls who grow up playing with it.
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Charles Montgomery (Happy City: Transforming Our Lives Through Urban Design)
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Technically the most impressive, however, is the story of the fall from grace of Ignus Nielsen – a prophet and Mazov’s schoolteacher. Despite being a noteworthy figure in the history of the communist movement, he became a disembodied spirit in the hands of the Vaasa censors. Mazov’s apocalyptic bloodthirsty character suddenly became somehow burdensome for the image of the social democratic Nordic countries. So they concocted Nielsen’s disappearance with Graad, following the newly defeated revolution. To the dismay of the censors, dozens of hours of film material were shot of Mazov during the technically advanced Eleven-Day Government, where the revolutionary icon was almost always accompanied by his best friend and comrade-in-arms, Nielsen. Destroying all the material would have raised suspicions. And so it was that an elliptical grey cytoplasm hovers permanently to Mazov’s right. It took historians decades to solve this eerie mystery.
Even today, many believe that the cytoplasm is Communism itself.
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Robert Kurvitz